If I understand it right, this gives companies ability to shift their services to and from AWS relatively painlessly. Do other cloud provides offer anything comparable?
Most Enterprise Customer's don't want to take any pain of redeploying the application to suit cloud. This becomes a tick in the box.
If you are using kvm w.r.t. openstack, the vm machine actually is suspended by way of acpi, then moved, then unfrozen again. VMware doesn't do that in vmotion. All your problems with clock skew, dropping of network traffic are lessened (they don't completely go away) with vmotion.
Nothing in the open source world currently matches NSX's ability to extend the network from on-prem to the cloud. I really wish they did, but it's not even a discussion.
Couldn't you already do this? AWS lets you import/export in OVA (an open, standardized format which is cross-hypervisor compatible) and VMDK (VMware's proprietary virtual disk format)[1]
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import...
This move opens the gate to more seamless migration of workloads between on-premises vSphere clusters and AWS, and extends native vSphere management and configuration functions into AWS. For big vSphere shops with large investments in the platform (especially those running legacy workloads), this product offering is a very, very big deal. If the costs are right, it will put true hybrid cloud operating models into reach of a lot of Enterprises for which the pricing or level of effort to get there previously didn't make sense.
If they want to innovate. They can move to IBM SoftLayer + VmWare on top, which is allegedly a solid offering, while keeping their ways of doing things.
The value in migrating is that you get access to the same VMware hypervisor and ecosystem, but now you have access to a wealth of new data services that are fully managed and much lower cost than building your own.
I know this is hard to believe, but in the early 1900s, any large business had a power generator in the basement, because the power grid was unreliable and daily outages were common. How many businesses today have their own power generators? In 2050, how many businesses do you think will have their own datacenters?
In an ideal application, instances are a commodity. Not every workload is there yet, so there's a need still for individual instance recovery. But it's something we and our customers strive for.
tl;dr In the VMware world you've always had the ability to specify your own MAC and IP address. In VMware Cloud on AWS you'll have the same ability.
I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...), so I can't fully comment on your situation, but it seems you could find out what specifically the license is attaching to and set that up again (if it's MAC, you just override the MAC, etc...).
The software I've used that bound to the CPU (which is silly as well) always had a mechanism to "de-register" the software specifically for migrating to new hardware. So you could setup your vm, install all your software, etc... then de-register the software (but leave it installed). Make your "appliance" image (OVA), import to the new "cloud" and re-register your application.
This is super, super common with legacy software products narrowly scoped to very specific business functions.
This was super super super super fun on IRIX when NIC died. Usually in the midst of work chaos.
This service will either need to choose between being much more expensive than raw AWS, and effectively killing Air overnight, regardless of the current claims.
I think containers are hyped _far greater_ than the benefit that they provide, and I still think it'd be swank if you could have CDNs retrieve containers and run them at the POPs if your workflow allows for it.
Interesting times and all that jazz.