Amazon pokes a hole in VMware with this new plugin

In case you didn’t believe Amazon is hungry for public cloud revenue from the biggest businesses, get this:

Today Amazon announced a new plugin for VMware’s popular vCenter software for managing data center infrastructure.

Admins of VMware-based on-premises data centers can now set up and manage Amazon cloud resources right from within vCenter with the new AWS Management Portal, according to a blog post on the new plugin from Amazon cloud chief evangelist Jeff Barr. And admins can move virtual machines from their data centers to Amazon’s cloud.

While Amazon has boasted about its traction inside of enterprises, easier compatibility with VMware environments, through technology like this plugin, could boost adoption. It could gradually add to the list of companies running hybrid clouds in conjunction with Amazon’s cloud.

Moves like this should be unsettling to VMware executives. VMware’s been gearing up its vCloud Hybrid Service so companies can move legacy applications to a VMware-friendly public cloud, but it’s unclear how popular the service is these days as low-price Microsoft, Google, and, yes, Amazon cloud resources are so easy to create. Your move, VMware.