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 conceptAWS conceptComment
Virtual MachinesEC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)IaaS
vCenter SSOIAM + 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 DaaSWorkspaces 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
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There may be some questions about my opinion of these comparative conceptual terms – if so, post a comment below.

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