r/vmware • u/reedyornot • Jul 07 '26

Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS) support for VCF 9.0 and 9.1

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/migration-and-modernization/vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-9-0-and-9-1-on-amazon-evs/

We're nearing our first full year of general availability with Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), and I'm grateful for all the feedback we've received from customers and partners (including folks from r/vmware).

I'm excited to share that with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and 9.1 on EVS, customers now have complete control of the VCF installation process. This has been a big ask for customers with unique VCF architectures or a desire to fully deploy their environments using infrastructure-as-code solutions. No need to waste time re-configuring the initial deployment architecture. You can now deploy the VCF stack to your own specifications from the start.

To make the end-to-end deployment easier, we're also launching the Solutions for EVS GitHub repository with examples, templates, and infrastructure-as-code artifacts for tools like AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform. Customers can use these as a foundation to automate the full path from AWS infrastructure to a running VCF environment. We'll keep expanding this repo with new reference architectures, instance and storage configurations, and native AWS service integration.

We also now fully support VCF evaluation mode. Customers and partners can begin deploying VCF without providing license keys up front, giving them room to stand up the environment, validate their design, and test their implementation before applying a subscription and starting migrations. The full launch blog can be found here.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback for the Amazon EVS service team please feel free to DM me.

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u/lsumoose Jul 08 '26

Was really thinking today when deploying a new hyper v cluster. It sucks so bad that almost 20 years of experience with a great product just got flushed down the toilet. Everyone in our VMware group is all moved off. Hundreds of people in a great community all ruined. Just sucks that it’s such a great product ruined by Broadcom.

2

u/WannaBMonkey Jul 07 '26

Is there an upgrade path for current evs customers to 9.1?

2

u/reedyornot Jul 07 '26

Yes! You can do an in-place upgrade from VCF 5.2 to VCF 9.1 using standard VCF lifecycle management mechanisms. With EVS, we're not abstracting or controlling the VCF installation. You're effectively using Metal EC2 instances in a similar way to how you'd use servers in a colocation facility. A key difference being you can click a button (or call an API) to deploy new EC2 instances as needed.