I spent yesterday visiting customers with Mark Lohmeyer, (VMware Vice President of Cloud Platform Business Unit) to discuss our hybrid cloud vision and the soon-to-be released VMC on AWS. You may be familiar with the similar service already available on IBM’s cloud offering.

VMC on AWS is vSphere, VSAN, and NSX (VMware software defined compute, storage, and networking) running natively on AWS bare metal (aka AWS Elastic Bare Metal). It is a joint engineering effort between VMware and Amazon to bring exact parity in cloud operations between on-premises and AWS.

Of particular interest, Mark described a tech preview that was not ready for VMworld NA 2016, but was demonstrated in Barcelona. It is called Elastic DRS. If you look at the architecture image above, you see AWS Global Infrastructure represented in the orange rectangle. This is where the AWS Elastic Bare Metal sits as individual hosts that run the VMware cloud stack.

Initial provisioning for a customer is 4 hosts. This satisfies the minimum for VSAN and HA capacity. Customers can then grow by adding additional hosts as needed.

Alternatively, the Elastic DRS feature can auto-scale by automatically provisioning new bare metal hosts when demand exceeds current capacity. Ultimately, it will be able to scale out, and then back based on demands.

So, we have traditional vCenter DRS, Predictive DRS, and now Elastic DRS.  this results in fully automated capacity management from bare metal through virtual workloads.

Click here for more on VMC on AWS.