Ravello Systems today announced the beta launch of Inception: the only way to run nested VMware ESXi on AWS or Google Cloud, and an industry-first in the virtualization and cloud world.
Ravello’s new offering significantly helps the VMware customer base and ecosystem by enabling multi-node VMware ESXi lab environments on demand – for development, testing, training, demos, proofs of concept and evaluations. Rather than wait for hardware or rely on hosting providers for setting up their sandboxes and test environments, VMware users and enterprises can simply install and configure ESXi on top of the most cost-effective, reliable and geographically spread clouds in the world, namely AWS and Google Cloud.
Technology innovation enables new use-cases for AWS and Google
“We have successfully implemented Intel VT and AMD-V functionality in software in Ravello HVX which now enables enterprises to run hypervisors like ESXi on AWS or Google Cloud,” said Rami Tamir, co-founder and CEO of Ravello Systems. “When combined with our overlay networking and blueprinting automation, it enables highly automated, rapid ESXi lab environments.”
Ravello had previously introduced the ability to nest the KVM hypervisor on AWS or Google Cloud, an offering that is currently being used by Red Hat for OpenStack training labs.
VMware gains an edge with on-demand ESXi labs
With Ravello’s launch of Inception, the VMware ecosystem is empowered to move faster by benefiting from the elasticity and agility of the public cloud.
VMware resellers, solution and training providers can now use leading public clouds for hosting online VMware demos, training labs and proof of concept environments without capacity concerns. In addition, fully automated cloud-based development and test environments for VMware Technology Alliance Partners who need to integrate with VMware vSphere and related products are now instantly accessible. Enterprises can use the public cloud to spin up small ESXi clusters for training, or spin up massive clusters with thousands of nodes to simulate a real data center for upgrade testing and new feature testing. It is expected that Ravello will enable faster adoption of VMware vSphere 6, which was released few weeks ago.
“Ravello is awesome. I am building out the entire VMware product stack, vSphere, vRA, vRO, Horizon, ITBM, SRM, vEverythingElse and running it on the Amazon or Google clouds – I don’t even care which one – It. Just. Works,” said Simon Gallagher, leading infrastructure architect, consultant and vExpert based in the United Kingdom. “And I just pay as I use capacity, none of the usual lab problems of balancing cost and low-capacity hardware – I just made it Amazon or Google’s problem.”
ESXi labs that cost less than a cup of coffee
The ability to spin up a complex multi-node ESXi environment in minutes, with a usage-based pricing model starting at $0.14 per hour for 2 vCPU,4GB chunks represents enormous savings in time and cost for the VMware community. For example, a 4 node environment comprising 2 ESXi nodes, 1 vCenter appliance and 1 shared storage appliance costs as little as $0.59/hr. And a 500-node environment with each ESXi node having 4 CPUs, 16GB RAM and multiple VLANs costs $530/hr.
