Amazon Web Services is hoping to lure VMware customers to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service with a new portal that allows admins to import virtual machines into the AWS cloud, and manage them from within vCentre.

AWS Management Portal runs on vCenter 5.1 or later as a plug-in and requires at least Internet Explorer 10. Sessions are authenticated to AWS using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) version 2.0.
Instances of different types can be deployed in all current AWS regions around the world, including Sydney, with Elastic Block Storage volumes up to one terabyte in size available.
Amazon said the management portal is designed for basic tasks such as creating virtual private clouds, network subnets and launching EC2 instances, and isn't a comprehensive tool for creating and managing AWS resources.
To do this, users have to use either the AWS management console, or AWS command line interface.
The AWS Management Portal for vCenter is free to download and use, but any Amazon services such as EBS or S3 storage consumed by customers are chargeable.