Most clouds are free to test. VMware's cut its price to $4k/month

VMware’s recognised that running its stuff on Amazon Web Services costs a bomb, so has reduced prices for your initial forays.

Running VMware on AWS requires you to spin up a four-host cluster at an on-demand cost of US$8.37/host/hour, or more than $24,000 a month.

At a time when numerous cloud providers let have servers to play with for free, that’s quite a sum.

Hence a change to the VMware-on-AWS service in a June upgrade that allows single-host implementations. VMware’s only offering these as test rigs as they’ll wipe themselves after thirty days, but the intent is clear – getting users to at least try VMware-on-AWS by reducing the price.

And reducing it quite a lot – prices start at $5.60 an hour, less than a single host. Which is still more than $4k a month, a fair sum even if it does include vSphere, VSAN and NSX.

The price is also indicative of the fact that whatever you do on the single host inside 30 days can be moved to a full four-node cluster.

We understand that no new engineering was required to pull this off, as VMware’s offered single-host offer to partners for some time. But now the rest of us can have it, too. The Register expects more of this before long: VMware’s blurb about the change says customers have been asking for smaller hosts and we understand that it won’t be long before smaller and cheaper AWS clusters reach price lists

VMware’s also flicked the switch on the Frankfurt site for its AWS service, which will help with GDPR because Virtzilla’s scored all the right ISO accreditations to prove its doing data protection Euro-right.

The update also adds stretch clusters, allowing VMware-on-AWS users to survive the failure of a single AWS availability zone. Horizon 7’s also become official, rather than preview, and all-flash VSANs-on-Amazon are now possible.

Another new addition is using VMware’s Amazonian instances as a DR target, or one of several DR targets in a multi-site rig.

VMware’s chuffed that this update is the fourth its managed in the nine months since it launched its AWS services.

There’s more to come, too, and it’s easy to see what because VMware puts future features on a public roadmap.

The Register has learned that anything on it marked “Preview” will probably land in the next quarterly update. Which, as luck would have it, will come just after VMware’s annual VMworld gabfest, slated for late August 2018. ®