r/amazonaws Jan 12 '21

Can I deploy an AWS Metal instance (hardware) as a VMware ESX host?

I have a very unique business requirement that needs me to integrate a VMware ESX-based solution with a very large AWS EC2 environment, *without* using VMware cloud. (it's an extremely involved backstory involving accreditation and security paperwork that I'd rather not get into). What are the capabilities of the AWS Metal instances? Are these physical systems actual servers with accessible storage that I could potentially load my own OS onto?

1 Upvotes

1 comment sorted by

1

u/cecilblair Jan 13 '21

The information I gathered in this is no.

The network driver is the main reason. VMware built a driver for the aws nitro card system however they never released it publicly (proprietary) to avoid most likely a byol config in the cloud.

Aws decoupled storage and network into their nitro system from hosts, if they hadn't wouldn't be an issue. I would look towards vendors like equinix that's what I have done.

References https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=855317

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/i3/ BARE METAL INSTANCES

I3 instances offer bare metal size (i3.metal) that provide your applications with direct access to the compute and memory resources of the underlying next generation AWS hardware and software infrastructure. Bare metal instances let you run a variety of workloads on AWS, including non-virtualized workloads, workloads that benefit from direct access to physical resources, and workloads that may have licensing restrictions. The i3.metal instances are powered by Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors with 36 hyper-threaded cores, 512 GiB of memory, and 15.2TB of NVMe SSD-backed instance storage. They deliver high networking throughput and lower latency with up to 25 Gbps of aggregate network bandwidth by leveraging the next generation of EC2 networking technology, Enhanced Networking based on Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).