Google Cloud Accelerates the Cloud Journey with VMware Engine

By David Marshall

This week, Google Cloud took aim at Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) and Microsoft’s partnerships with VMware by upping its own game with the virtualization giant. The cloud company has taken the next step in its partnership with VMware by making it easier to migrate and run VMware workloads on Google Cloud. They have announced the new Google Cloud VMware Engine, delivering a fully-managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack on dedicated Google infrastructure.  

This is a fully native, first-party solution for customers to migrate or run VMware environments and applications in Google Cloud.

Google seems to be betting on VMware to attract more workloads to its cloud.  Last summer, they announced it would begin supporting VMware workloads on Google Cloud.  And it was last November that Google Cloud acquired CloudSimple, a company that specialized in running VMware environments and provided a secure, high performance, dedicated environment in Public Clouds to run VMware workloads.

“VMware and Google Cloud are working together to help power customers’ multi-cloud strategies, and the new Google Cloud VMware Engine will enable our mutual customers to drive digital transformation and business resiliency using the same VMware Cloud Foundation running in their data centers today,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit at VMware.

“Google Cloud VMware Engine enables organizations to quickly deploy their VMware environment in Google Cloud, delivering scale, agility and access to cloud-native services while leveraging the familiarity and investment in VMware tools and training.”

The VMware Engine service provides users a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack with all of the standard Cloud Foundation components such as VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T and HCX for cloud migration, and promising end-to-end support.  

Google Cloud manages the lifecycle of the VMware software stack and manages all related infrastructure and upgrades.  With all of this, Google Cloud General Manager June Yang states that businesses will be able to quickly stand up their own software-defined data center in the Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud VMware Engine is designed to minimize your operational burden, so you can focus on your business,” said Yang.  “We take care of the lifecycle of the VMware software stack and manage all related infrastructure and upgrades.  Customers can continue to leverage IT management tools and third-party services consistent with their on-premises environment.”

Google is working with third-party providers like Actifio, Cohesity, Dell Technologies, NetApp, Veeam and Zerto to ensure their solutions work on Google’s platform as well, which will ease the migration journey and enable business continuity.

Below is a representative reference architecture on how you can migrate or extend your VMware environment to Google Cloud.

For any enterprise VMware environment, IT resilience is key.  One of those third-party partners named is Zerto.  That type of partnership is important to ensure customers can successfully run and manage their data protection, disaster recovery and migration projects seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments.

Using Zerto’s IT Resilience platform can help Google Cloud customers to easily migrate and protect native VMware workloads on Google Cloud without having to re-architect their existing VMware-based applications, allowing IT staff to continue using those same policies, procedures and VMware tools that they are already accustomed to.
 
“We’re excited to partner with Zerto and to integrate its capabilities in disaster recovery and backup with Google Cloud,” said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud.  “Zerto’s expertise in supporting and securing VMware workloads in the cloud will be a benefit to organizations that are increasingly running mission-critical workloads on Google Cloud.”

“Zerto support for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) helps our mutual customers protect their digital infrastructure,” said Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, HCI BU, VMware.  “As an Advanced tier Technology Alliance Partner, Zerto is helping customers realize the unique VMware ability to offer consistent storage policy-based management across traditional storage and hyperconverged infrastructure.”

If this opportunity sounds interesting, you don’t have long to wait.  According to Google Cloud, this new fully managed service is expected to be generally available this quarter out of two US regions, and expanding into additional Google Cloud regions globally in the second half of the year.

As Google makes progress in the enterprise cloud space, it still has a long way to go before it comes even close to overtaking AWS, the current number one cloud provider, or even catching up to Microsoft Azure at number two for that matter. But, this is definitely a good place to start.

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About the Author

David Marshall is an industry recognized virtualization and cloud computing expert, an eleven time recipient of the VMware vExpert distinction, and has been heavily involved in the industry for the past 20+ years.  To help solve industry challenges, he co-founded and helped start several successful virtualization software companies such as ProTier, Surgient, Hyper9 and Vertiscale. He also spent a number of years transforming desktop virtualization while at Virtual Bridges.

David is an author of two very popular server virtualization books and the Technical Editor on Wiley’s “Virtualization for Dummies” and “VMware VI3 for Dummies” books.  David authored countless articles for a number of well known technical magazines, including: InfoWorld, Virtual-Strategy and TechTarget.  In 2004, he founded the oldest independent virtualization and cloud computing news site, VMblog.com, which he still operates today.

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