VMware and AWS are extending their hybrid cloud partnership: at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the pair revealed plans to add disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) to the VMware Cloud on AWS service. They also announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available to customers of the US East region, and not just US West.

The upcoming disaster recovery service, VMware Site Recovery, will not just allow customers to back up their virtual machines with AWS as a failsafe, but also to duplicate them across several availability zones.

If you can’t beat ’em

The pair teamed up last year and introduced VMware Cloud on AWS in August, enabling AWS customers to run applications in vSphere environments. Amazon’s public cloud rival Microsoft has since announced it would offer the full VMware stack in Azure data centers, though it has delayed the rollout after VMware said it would neither certify nor support the offering.

“We are pleased to extend availability of VMware Cloud on AWS to the AWS US East region. Both teams have been really focused on quickly iterating to provide the capabilities that our customers have told us they want,” said Sandy Carter, VP for enterprise workloads at AWS. 

Before the end of February 2018, AWS and VMware are planning to introduce VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, enabling customers move to the public cloud without changing their network, IP, and routing configurations. They will also make VMware vMotion available on AWS Direct Connect, a service which allows customers to connect their corporate networks to public infrastructure using private links.

Whereas customers are currently limited in how many VMs they can create on AWS at once (somewhere in the multiple hundreds), soon they will be able to spin up tens of thousands of machines at once, thanks to the introduction of 32-host clusters with up to 10 clusters per software-defined data center.

In addition, AWS customers will soon be able to access VMware’s Wavefront service, an open API platform supporting over 80 integrations to help monitor their infrastructure and track their CPU and network usage.

Finally, VMware is planning to introduce new one-year and three-year subscription options for VMware Cloud on AWS, promising a reduction of up to 50 percent on customers’ infrastructure costs when compared to on-demand pricing.