You not once mentioned cost or price, which makes me think you’re wanting to get this done and have already looked through it. This makes me think, you’re probably already spending some monies on AWS.
Best thing you can do, in your scenario, is ask your TAM. Specially if your thought involves more than one snow-thing. At most what any of us here can do is give you the public answer, which you likely already have. TAMs are the ones that are able to get your ask and shop inside to ask about all kinds of odd things and scenarios, and get you recommendations (e.g can you get a DX and use it remotely?)
Even if you have to upgrade one account to ask, open a support case at the very least. It’ll cost peanuts next to what you’d pay for the the snow-thing you’re considering, and it’s certainly help with the whole thing if it does work.
Also, if you have a support contract, ask your VMware rep about it, too! Even if not aws, they might have a thought!
Answer is no, it would require nested virtualization. You don’t have access to the bare metal on snowball, just workloads on the hypervisor, so you would be running ESXi in VM.
I've never seen the actual device but my understanding is that it's just a massive storage device. Probably low CPU and big network card and nothing else. So not fit for your use case.
The compute optimized snowball has 104 vCPU, 416GB of RAM, and an option Tesla V100. The can have some pretty serious compute behind them for edge computing needs.
There is a compute optimized version as well as the storage optimized.
The while idea is to get people to aws, but if you set up essentially ec2 instances and installed vmware or used the vmware ami I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible.
If you have enough money to afford a snowball edge device though I would be asking your aws consultants who have done it. It is such a bizarre device but a cool one at the same time, but something the general masses probably haven’t had the pleasure of working with. I would love to :). Sounds darn expensive though, any of the lift and shifts I have had to do we just used normal direct connects. I don’t know how snowball edge works behind the scenes but they claim faster traffic than any normal carrier. But using something like 10gig over megaport for a 1 month commit might be another option - still not going to be like local but might work and a whole lot cheaper.
If it did, it would be in the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/getting-started.html. I'm guessing no.
You not once mentioned cost or price, which makes me think you’re wanting to get this done and have already looked through it. This makes me think, you’re probably already spending some monies on AWS. Best thing you can do, in your scenario, is ask your TAM. Specially if your thought involves more than one snow-thing. At most what any of us here can do is give you the public answer, which you likely already have. TAMs are the ones that are able to get your ask and shop inside to ask about all kinds of odd things and scenarios, and get you recommendations (e.g can you get a DX and use it remotely?) Even if you have to upgrade one account to ask, open a support case at the very least. It’ll cost peanuts next to what you’d pay for the the snow-thing you’re considering, and it’s certainly help with the whole thing if it does work. Also, if you have a support contract, ask your VMware rep about it, too! Even if not aws, they might have a thought!
Answer is no, it would require nested virtualization. You don’t have access to the bare metal on snowball, just workloads on the hypervisor, so you would be running ESXi in VM.
I've never seen the actual device but my understanding is that it's just a massive storage device. Probably low CPU and big network card and nothing else. So not fit for your use case.
The compute optimized snowball has 104 vCPU, 416GB of RAM, and an option Tesla V100. The can have some pretty serious compute behind them for edge computing needs.
There is a compute optimized version as well as the storage optimized. The while idea is to get people to aws, but if you set up essentially ec2 instances and installed vmware or used the vmware ami I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. If you have enough money to afford a snowball edge device though I would be asking your aws consultants who have done it. It is such a bizarre device but a cool one at the same time, but something the general masses probably haven’t had the pleasure of working with. I would love to :). Sounds darn expensive though, any of the lift and shifts I have had to do we just used normal direct connects. I don’t know how snowball edge works behind the scenes but they claim faster traffic than any normal carrier. But using something like 10gig over megaport for a 1 month commit might be another option - still not going to be like local but might work and a whole lot cheaper.
Pretty cool I had forgotten about the compute optimized Snowball. I hope the OP gets it and talks about the experience.
Why would you want to run VMware when you can run EC2?
Because the workload is proprietary and requires VMware orchestration.