VMware Cloud on AWS for Health

VMware Cloud on AWS provides healthcare customers with scalable solutions to migrate and extend their on-premises environments to the public cloud. Using VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can consolidate their on-premises data centers, extend their data center capacity with cloud resources, and enhance their disaster recovery capabilities.

What's New

Benefits of deploying VMware Cloud solutions on AWS

Healthcare organizations realize significant value by leveraging their existing investments using the VMware Cloud on AWS solutions to respond to changing needs, accelerate innovation, and align costs to usage requirements.

Minimize redesign and rapidly innovate

Extend your on-premises applications to the cloud with no required redesign to immediately take advantage of AWS Cloud capabilities.

Maximize resiliency of mission-critical applications

Enlist virtual machine, host, and AWS Availability Zone failure protection at the infrastructure level without having to redesign applications for the cloud.

Reduce operational costs

Reduce your hardware, operating, and labor costs while maximizing your existing investments and increasing your operational reliability, stability, and resiliency.

Maintain security and governance

Migrate and extend existing on-premises enterprise security, governance and operational policies to the cloud.

Healthcare organizations deploying VMware Cloud on AWS

FEATURED CUSTOMER STORY

A large private healthcare provider in the U.S. with over 70,000 employees — comprised of over 20 hospitals and over 700 outpatient facilities servicing over 10 million people — needed to rapidly scale to support their organization’s efforts to fight disease as well as support demand from mobile healthcare worker pop-up sites and new acquisitions. Learn how VMware Cloud on AWS enabled them to consolidate data centers, rapidly scale to meet business demands, and support their remote users. 

Explore the story »

VMware cloud on AWS deployment

Click for a technical deep dive on the architecture, best practices, and deployment options.

  • What does this solution do?

    Workloads that require high availability should be architected and configured with specific architectural patterns and configuration options to maximize its resiliency.

    With VMware Cloud on AWS running on top of the AWS Global Infrastructure and managed by VMware, customers no longer have to worry about the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure hardware and software maintenance.

    Hardware failures and data center outages can happen, but there are solutions available that can help you automatically failover. Customers are responsible for leveraging these and the built-in capabilities of SDDC to protect their business-critical workloads against regional and data center failures.

    Detailed process flow: 

    1. VMware HA (High Availability) will restart virtual machines on surviving hosts in the event of a host failure, providing site local resiliency. You should ensure you configure their vSAN policies to ensure you meet your site’s local performance and recovery requirements based on the amount of host failures their business will tolerate using a recommended policy of FTT2.
    2. Use VMware stretch clusters to protect VMs by restarting them on the remote site providing AWS Availability Zone resiliency within a region.
    3. Use VMware Site Recovery to protect on premises and/or VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC workloads between regions. VMware Site Recovery provides you with protection against regional disasters, and helps you meet your regulatory requirements.
    4. Amazon S3 buckets are regional constructs, you can configure S3 to store backups in different regions to protect you from regional failures. This is not done by default, and you should ensure this is configured to meet regulatory and recovery requirements.
    5. If you use Amazon FSx, you can configure this in the secondary (DR) region. You should configure an AWS DataSync agent near your source data, as well as the DataSync service to replicate data from the source to the DR region or Availability Zone.
    6. Use AWS DataSync to copy data between Amazon EFS file systems, which should be placed in different regions and Availability Zones to ensure they can meet the recoverability requirements.
    7. Changes to vCenter and NSX configurations are not saved until the next scheduled and completed backup. You are responsible to ensure these change details are captured in change logs, architecture diagrams, and internal change control processes. vSAN is not backed up, so you must ensure backups are configured, tested, and stored outside the SDDC.
    8. Have at least two virtual interfaces over separate physical AWS Direct Connect connections terminating at different Direct Connect locations for consistent performance while using VPNs as a backup.

    Ask an expert

    Have a more technical question and need to speak to someone with expertise? Send an email to an AWS expert to get your questions answered.

    Learn more

    Find out more information about the VMware Cloud on AWS.
    TECHNICAL BLOG

    Resiliency design considerations and best practices for VMware Cloud on AWS

    This blog elaborates on key resiliency design considerations and architectural patterns and responsibilities for customers leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS workloads with high availability requirements.

    Read now »

    WEBINAR

    Modernize healthcare applications using VMware Cloud™ on AWS

    To accelerate innovation in healthcare, providers, payors, and health tech organizations benefit from deploying a hybrid cloud strategy. This webinar will describe:
    1/ the benefits of a hybrid cloud for data center modernization, business continuity, and next generation application development; 2/ why the VMware Cloud on AWS solution meets today’s healthcare IT challenges; 3/how to accelerate healthcare innovation use cases by leveraging cloud computing; 4/best practices in deploying VMware workloads on AWS

    Watch now »

  • What does this solution do?

    Organizations need to consider the architectural best practices for implementing DR using VMware Cloud on AWS. By combining the trusted and proven VMware DR technologies, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, with the massive scalability, availability, speed, and cost benefits of the AWS Cloud, organizations can realize the benefits of cost reduction, operational simplification, and faster time to protection for disaster recovery and DR testing.

    VMware Cloud on AWS offers four levels of DR support with increasing complexity and decreasing RPO/RTO, including Backup and Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby in AWS, and Hot Standby Active/Active. We explore the Backup and Restore use case below. Consult with your AWS account rep to identify the most appropriate DR solution to deploy for your needs. 

    Backup and Restore
    At the simplest form of DR, a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) can be ready to start deploying workloads within 120 minutes to support an on-demand disaster recovery. The ability to spin up resources on-demand is a cost-effective approach preventing idle resources waiting for use.

    On-premise backups are configured with backup repositories that can extend to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A VMware Cloud on AWS certified backup is required. The backup data gets offloaded to the S3 bucket based on a zero-day value move policy which dictates the operational restore window.

    From the diagram above: 

    1. Amazon Route 53 handles DNS requests to the primary data center.
    2. The Backup & Replication server backs up workloads to the backup repository.
    3. Local data from the backup repository offloads to the Capacity Tier in Amazon S3 through AWS Direct Connect or the internet.
    4. The recovery process launches and configures the VMware SDDC cluster in the designated AWS recovery region through web portal automation scripts using vRA or vCLI.
    5. A new backup repository instance deployed and configured within the newly-created SDDC.
    6. Previous data stored in S3 is detected. The initial metadata and archive index sync is executed.
    7. Workloads recovered into the SDDC cluster and services are brought back online.
    8. Amazon Route 53 record setting updates to resolve requests to the new secondary data center in the cloud.

    Ask an expert

    Have a more technical question and need to speak to someone with expertise? Send an email to an AWS expert to get your questions answered.

    Learn more

    Find out more information about the VMware Cloud on AWS.
    TECHNICAL BLOG

    Design considerations for disaster recovery with VMware Cloud on AWS

    As organizations plan hybrid cloud strategies, disaster recovery (DR) is a vital consideration to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. This blog will discuss the architectural considerations and best practices for implementing DR using VMware Cloud on AWS. 

    Read now »

    WEBINAR

    Modernize healthcare applications using VMware Cloud™ on AWS

    To accelerate innovation in healthcare, providers, payors, and health tech organizations benefit from deploying a hybrid cloud strategy. This webinar will describe:
    1/ the benefits of a hybrid cloud for data center modernization, business continuity, and next generation application development; 2/ why the VMware Cloud on AWS solution meets today’s healthcare IT challenges; 3/how to accelerate healthcare innovation use cases by leveraging cloud computing; 4/best practices in deploying VMware workloads on AWS

    Watch now »

Resources

See related technical guides, webinars, white papers and much more.

WEBINAR
Modernize healthcare applications using VMware Cloud™ on AWS

To accelerate innovation in healthcare, providers, payors, and health tech organizations benefit from deploying a hybrid cloud strategy. This webinar will describe:

1/ the benefits of a hybrid cloud for data center modernization, business continuity, and next generation application development; 2/ why the VMware Cloud on AWS solution meets today’s healthcare IT challenges; 3/how to accelerate healthcare innovation use cases by leveraging cloud computing; 4/best practices in deploying VMware workloads on AWS.

Watch now »

SOLUTION BRIEF
VMware Cloud on AWS for healthcare

View and download a snapshot of the challenges olved by and benefits associated with the VMware Cloud on AWs solution for healthcare applications, along with common use cases and a reference architecture.

Read now »

WHITEPAPER
The business value of VMware Cloud on AWS for supporting business-critical applications

IDC conducted an in-depth study to evaluate the business values and benefits for organizations using VMware Cloud on AWS. Read this paper to: 1/ assess the financial benefits of VMware Cloud AWS; 2/ understand why customers chose VMware Cloud on AWS to improve their IT infrastructure, and scale their business; and 3/help you plan for your migration and modernization strategy with the expertise and experience of current customers.

Read now »

WEBINAR
Journey to the Cloud: VMware on AWS in Canadian healthcare

This 1.5 hour on-demand webinar examines and demos multiple scenarios including how to 1/ accelerate cloud migration for VMware workloads; 2/ expand your data centre to the cloud; 3/explore workload elasticity through disaster recovery as a service; and 4/modernize your applications.

Read now »

BLOG
Design considerations for disaster recovery with VMware Cloud on AWS

As organizations plan hybrid cloud strategies, disaster recovery (DR) is a vital consideration to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. This blog will discuss the architectural considerations and best practices for implementing DR using VMware Cloud on AWS. 

Read now »

BUYER'S GUIDE
Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS buyers guide for healthcare

This buyer's guide helps you understand the key factors when considering a cloud strategy for their desktops and applications, from identifying high-level goals and use cases, to building a business case and planning how to deliver the user experience your end users expect. 

Read now »

TECHNICAL BLOG
Resiliency design considerations and best practices for VMware Cloud on AWS

This blog elaborates on key resiliency design considerations and architectural patterns and responsibilities for customers leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS workloads with high availability requirements.

Read now »

WEBINAR
How regulated industries can address cloud migration challenges and innovate faster

For companies in regulated industries, maintaining the highest standards of compliance, ensuring data security, and minimizing risk are key considerations when migrating to the public cloud. In this webinar, you'll learn:

1/ How to quickly and securely migrate VMware workloads to AWS for datacenter extension, evacuation, or disaster recovery; 2/ how to manage a full stack of applications on VMware Cloud on AWS, leveraging familiar processes, IT skillsets, and governance; 3/ how financial services and healthcare customers can modernize applications by using native AWS services.

Read now »

BLOG
Storage options and designs for VMware Cloud on AWS

If you have workloads with varying storage requirements, it’s important to understand the storage options available and how they could work best for different scenarios. To choose the right service, you must first understand the storage requirements and performance profiles of your VMware vSphere workloads. This blog discusses the considerations, design, and benefits of each offering so you could find the solution that works best for your business.

Read now »

BLOG
NHS Digital accelerates roll-out of digitally-enabled care with VMware Cloud on AWS

NHS Digital, the national information and technology partner for the UK’s health and care system, made VMware Cloud on AWS available across the NHS to help accelerate digitally-enabled care and drive down costs and improve operational efficiencies.

Read to learn how VMware Cloud on AWS has enabled NHS Digital to create a new commercial model to act as a single cloud service broker to organizations across NHS and the UK public sector.

Read now »

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