question about hosting on AWS

[RadarG]

If we wanted to migrate a few machines to AWS. What is the best way to do this? I heard that using cloud foundation with AWS is bad because Amazon dedicates a non shared host and the cost per hr is high. Is this true?

[scott28tt]

There is an area of VMTN for VMware Cloud on AWS, I've reported your thread to moderators asking them to move it there.

[ebernard]

Hi RadarG

Your question generates questions! 🙂

First, when you mean AWS, do you mean native AWS (EC2, EBS..) or our VMware Cloud on AWS Service?

Just to say that, 1st option can run only workloads in native AWS mode, you don't have the ability to run our VMware hypervisor (vSphere) on top of AWS servers, on your own. Either you choose to transform your current VMware workloads to run on AWS native services OR you choose to adopt VMware Cloud on AWS (aka VMC).

In this case, you have access to a VMware environment (VMware Cloud Foundation), fully automated and deployed by VMware running on AWS infrastructure (servers) and datacenters among 18 Regions.
Pricing is per host and you can purchase this service in On demand model (pay per hour) for a couple of hours, days or weeks... or if you plan to run it longer you can purchase it in "Reserved instances" mode, with a commitment on your side in term of duration but you will save you money compared to "On demand" mode.

So, about your statement about higher price, it's quite tricky to answer because as explained above we are providing an entire host that can run many VMs and you are totally free to choose consolidation ratio (10 VMs, 20, 40, 50 VMs per host...) while with AWS native services to pay at VM and resources level which is totally different. 
You can start to deploy VMC with 2 nodes to build a cluster and get something ready for production. You have also the ability to start with a single node but as this is not for production, it will be stopped after 30 days.

That's a topic which requires a lot of discussions and that deserves to work on.

Hope that helped you to understand differences 🙂

Emmanuel