VMware vs. AWS
In my recent AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam, one of the key learning areas that I needed to master, was the change in terminology to transfer my knowledge from VMware vs. AWS. Obviously, there is no direct one-to-one mapping of the product offerings, but there are some common areas, at a conceptual level.
So, here is a table, that roughly equates the concepts to each other;
| VMware concept | AWS concept | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Machines | EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | IaaS |
| vCenter SSO | IAM + Directory Service | |
| vNet / Virtual Network | VPC, Subnet | VMware uses VLAN(s), AWS uses CIDRs |
| VM on standalone host | Instance Store | When an EC2 instance is powered off, instance store hosted VMs are deleted |
| VM Template | AMI (Amazon Machine Image) | |
| none (needs NSX/SDN) | Security Group | This is port filtering (firewall) for a VM |
| Customize OS | EC2Config | Windows OS customisation |
| NFS presented storage | EBS (Elastic Block Store) | EBS backed block storage is presented to EC2 instances for their additional storage |
| vMotion / migrate | none | Not applicable for AWS |
| vCenter cluster HA DRS group | Availability Zone | |
| Horizon DaaS | Workspaces | Hosted desktops |
| none | S3 (Simple Storage Service) | Object storage is file-based |
| Site Recovery Manager | none | Not available or applicable on AWS |
| VDP | Glacier / Storage Gateway VTL | Glacier is object/file based |
| vRealize Operations / vCenter | Cloud Watch | |
| SpringSource / vFabric | Elastic Beanstalk / Cloud Formation | PaaS |
| Log Insight / vCenter | Cloud Trail + Inspector | Log Insight also does analytics of other data sources |
| NSX | WAF | NSX is a full software defined networking and security suite, which contains WAF. |
| Power Off VM & delete | Terminate Instance | |
| Hot Add RAM / CPU | none | Not available on AWS |
| VM properties, disks | EBS, Volumes | VMware files under VM, AWS shows all volumes, disks and snapshots together |
| DRS Resource Pool affinity rules | Placement Group | AWS paradigm is IaaS based |
There may be some questions about my opinion of these comparative conceptual terms – if so, post a comment below.
