(Photo courtesy Flickr user Leonardo Rizzi / cc2.0)

VMware unveiled the latest step in its evolving partnership with Amazon Web Services Wednesday, bringing the VMware Cloud for AWS to European customers alongside several new features for VMware’s data center customers running hybrid cloud strategies.

For a while there it looked like VMware might get left behind in the rush to cloud computing, but as the inevitability of hybrid computing has set in among large enterprise companies with large infrastructure investments to pay down, it has found a way to keep growing. The new services unveiled Wednesday all reflect this hybrid world, which generally involves a mix of homegrown data centers for steady workloads and cloud services for workloads prone to spikes in demand, or disaster recovery.

VMware has helped customers move applications between public clouds and their own data centers with Hybrid Cloud Extension, and it’s now extending that service to help customers port workloads from one private data center to another. This is useful for companies that are consolidating data centers as they add cloud services to their mix, said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Business unit at VMware.

The company also introduced several new monitoring and data analytics service that now work with the VMware Cloud for AWS product. First released last year, VMware Cloud for AWS allows VMware customers to keep their on-premises investments in virtualized apps while being able to take advantage of cloud services provided by AWS when needed. Most people using VMware Cloud for AWS are already customers of both companies, Lohmeyer said.

“Part of what many customers are excited about is moving to a cloud environment but having native and local access to AWS services,” said Matt Garman, vice president of AWS Compute Services.

The new version of the product will allow them to move additional mission-critical applications to AWS as needed by extending the number of availability zones in which VMware Cloud for AWS can run within a single region, he said. Multiple availability zones provide a little insurance in case something goes wrong in one availability zone, like what happened to AWS customers last week in Northern Virginia.

VMware Cloud for AWS will also now run on AWS’ London region, opening up the service to European customers. The companies plan to bring the service to the Asia-Pacific region at some point in the second half of the year but didn’t specify which region.

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