Hello again, everyone! VMware and AWS have announced that the new i4i bare metal instance type is now available for VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS customers! This new instance type offers new capacity options and performance enhancements compared to the prior i3 and i3en bare metal instance types. Here’s a quick look at how the three instance types compare:
| i3 | i3en | i4i |
|---|---|---|
| Intel Xeon E5-2686 36 cores @ 2.3 GHz 72 logical cores | Intel Xeon Cascade Lake 48 cores @ 2.5 GHz 96 logical cores | Intel Xeon Ice Lake 64 cores @ 3.5 GHz 128 logical cores |
| 512 GiB RAM | 768 GiB RAM | 1,024 GiB RAM |
| vSAN with local NVMe All-Flash SSD | vSAN with local NVMe All-Flash SSD | vSAN with local AWS Nitro SSDs |
| 15.2 TiB (8x SSD) Raw Storage Capacity | 60 TiB (8x SSD) Raw Storage Capacity | 30 TiB (8x Nitro SSD) Raw Storage Capacity |
| 25 Gbps Network | 100 Gbps Network | 75 Gbps Network |
| AWS i3.metal Spec | AWS i3en.metal Spec | AWS i4i.metal Spec |
AWS Regional Availability
- At launch, the i4i.metal instance type is available in the following AWS regions:
- Americas
- US West (N. California)
- US West (Oregon)
- US East (N. Virginia)
- US East (Ohio)
- Canada (Central)
- Europe
- Europe (Ireland)
- Europe (London)
- Europe (Paris)
- Europe (Frankfurt)
- Asia
- Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
- Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
- Asia Pacific (Singapore)
- Asia Pacific (Sydney)
- Additional regional availability coming soon
While this just scratches the surface in terms of what’s available, you can learn more at the links below.
Additional Resources
VMware’s VMC on AWS i4i.metal announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud/2022/08/30/announcing-a-new-instance-type-for-vmware-cloud-on-aws-i4i-metal
VMware Cloud on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/vmware
Doug's Blog 