VMware has expanded its cloud offering on AWS to Asia Pacific (Sydney) region, the company announced at the VMworld 2018 conference in Las Vegas.

To make its cloud more appealing to new customers, VMware is cutting the price on AWS by 50%. It will offer a smaller 3-host minimum SDDC configuration as a starting point for production workloads. Earlier the minimum starting point for four hosts.

That’s not all, VMware is also offering the 3-Host SDDC environment for the cost of a 2-Host configuration, for a limited period.

VMware is looking at all three use-cases, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and cloud-native. To make its cloud even more affordable, VMware is optimizing license for enterprise applications. The new custom CPU core count capabilities allow customers to specify just the number of CPU cores they need, reducing the cost of running mission-critical applications that are licensed per CPU core. With VM-Host Affinity customers will be able to pin workloads to a specific host group to support licensing requirements.

The most critical part of the multi-cloud strategy is being able to leave the safe haven of data-center and move to the cloud. VMware and AWS are offering Instant Data Center evacuation with live migration of 1000’s of VMs.

It allows customers to move thousands of live VMs with zero downtime and schedule exactly when to cut over to the new cloud environment with VMware NSX Hybrid Connect (previously known as VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension) powered by vMotion and vSphere Replication. VMware is offering a free migration cost assessment with VMware Cost Insight as part of the core service to assist with cloud migration planning.

VMware also announced new capabilities that help organizations around the globe to rapidly migrate applications and data centers to an intrinsically secure cloud service that meets enterprise application needs.

As customers move their VMs to AWS, they gain granular control over east-west traffic between workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS through micro-segmentation provided by NSX. Security policies can be defined based on workload attributes (e.g., VM names, OS versions) and user-defined tags, are dynamically enforced at the VM-level, and follow workloads wherever they are moved.

As the enterprise landscape is changing so is the company that started the virtualization revolution. VMware already is a dominant player in the virtualization space and with VIC (vSphere Integrated Containers), VKE (VMware Kuberntes Engine) and PKS ( Pivotal Container Service ), VMware is filling the gap with the containerized world. It may not be the biggest container player, but it’s certainly the only players that have such a wide and deep breath of offerings.