The skyline of Frankfurt, Germany. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Christian Wolf / cc3.0)

It’s been almost a year since VMware rolled out the fruits of its partnership with Amazon Web Services on hybrid cloud products, and the company is now making it easier for potential customers to see if it’s something that makes sense for their infrastructure strategies.

VMware Cloud on AWS will now support single-host configurations for a limited trial period, allowing potential customers to save a little money compared to the required four-host configuration that regular customers must adopt, said VMware’s Sai Gopalan, senior product line manager for VMware Cloud on AWS. A host, in this case, refers to a AWS EC2 bare-metal server with two 18-core processors and 512GBs of memory.

“This is really designed for customers who want to prove out the use-case,” Gopalan said. Companies with skeptical finance departments might not necessarily understand why connecting their on-premises data centers with AWS makes sense for their overall technology operation, and the 30-day single-host trial allows those companies to pay $7 per hour per host for the trial run. The regular on-demand price is $8.37 per hour per host, or just under $52,000 if you reserve that host for a year, and you have to get four hosts.

VMware wouldn’t comment on how many people are using VMware Cloud on AWS as we approach the one-year anniversary of its general availability release in August. But there is definitely momentum around hybrid cloud in general, and this partnership connects the leader in on-premises virtualization software with the public cloud market leader.

VMware Cloud on AWS is also now available in Frankfurt, Germany, adding a second AWS European region to the U.K. option. The service is also available in US East (Northern Virgina) and US West (Oregon).

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