VMware Cloud on AWS

An organisation with hundreds of on-prem VMware VMs wants to exit its data center fast, without re-architecting every workload into native EC2 or containers, and without retraining its VMware operators. VMware Cloud on AWS runs a complete VMware Software-Defined Data Center — vSphere (compute), vSAN (storage), NSX (networking), vCenter (management) — on dedicated, single-tenant bare-metal EC2 hosts inside an AWS VPC. Existing VMs, tools (vMotion, HCX, vRealize), and skills carry over unchanged, while the workloads gain low-latency access to native AWS services next door.

• An SDDC is deployed in an AWS Region. A stretched cluster option spans two AZs with synchronous vSAN replication for host/AZ fault tolerance; a standard cluster sits in one AZ.
• It lives in an AWS-managed VPC connected to your customer VPC via a cross-account ENI, so VMs reach RDS, S3, and other AWS services privately and cheaply.
• Connectivity to your remaining on-prem estate is over Direct Connect or VPN, typically with VMware HCX handling bulk migration and live vMotion.

graph LR
subgraph ONPREM["On-Premises VMware"]
  VMS["Existing VMs + vCenter"]
end
VMS -->|"HCX / vMotion (DX or VPN)"| SDDC
subgraph AWS["AWS Region"]
  subgraph SDDC["VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (dedicated bare-metal hosts)"]
    VSPHERE["vSphere"]
    VSAN["vSAN"]
    NSX["NSX"]
  end
  NATIVE["Native AWS (RDS, S3, ELB, ...)"]
  SDDC -->|"low-latency ENI"| NATIVE
end
classDef sddc fill:#f3ecfb,stroke:#8b3de0,stroke-width:2px,color:#3a1a5c
classDef aws fill:#eaf7ec,stroke:#2e8b3d,stroke-width:2px,color:#1a3d20
class VSPHERE,VSAN,NSX sddc
class NATIVE aws

You pay per host (a fixed hardware spec), On-Demand or with 1- or 3-year reserved commitments for large discounts, with a minimum cluster size (production clusters need multiple hosts). That covers the bundled VMware licensing and the SDDC software. Native AWS services you call are billed normally; data transfer between the SDDC and a customer VPC in the same AZ is free, which is a major reason to co-locate.

• Trigger phrases: “migrate a large VMware estate to AWS quickly,” “keep using vSphere/vCenter/vMotion and existing VMware skills,” “hybrid VMware environment,” “lift-and-shift without re-platforming” → VMware Cloud on AWS.
• It’s dedicated bare-metal EC2 hosts — single-tenant, not shared. That’s why there’s a per-host price and a minimum cluster size.
• Stretched clusters across 2 AZs give infrastructure HA with synchronous storage — mention this for “must survive an AZ failure” VMware scenarios.
• VMware HCX is the migration engine (bulk migration, live vMotion, WAN optimization) between on-prem and the SDDC.
• VMware Cloud on AWS vs Outposts: VMC runs VMware’s stack on AWS hardware in a Region; Outposts runs AWS’s stack on AWS hardware in your data center.
• Post-migration, you can modernise gradually — move individual VMs to native EC2, containers, or managed databases at your own pace.