In a recent blog post, Google announced the general availability of its Cloud VMware Engine. With the release, Google claims that customers can migrate their existing VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without refactoring or rewriting them.
Earlier in April, the tech company announced the Google Cloud VMware Engine service, which provides a VMware engine stack. It is a fully-managed VMware Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform and consists of:
- VMware vSphere, the flagship cloud computing virtualization platform
- vCenter, a centralized management utility
- vSAN, storage virtualization software
- NSX-T, a full-stack Layer 2 to Layer 7 networking platform
- HCX, an application mobility platform for cloud migration
By leveraging the Google Cloud VMware Engine, customers can "extend or bring their on-premises workloads to Google Cloud in minutes, and without changes," by connecting to a dedicated VMware environment.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine
With the GA release of Google Cloud, VMware Engine users can provision VMware in minutes using the Google Cloud Console – potentially with their existing Google Cloud identities. Also, support for the service is integrated from the Google Cloud, and consumption is visible in the standard billing view of the Google Cloud Console.
On the Google Cloud, according to the announcement blog, the infrastructure environment consists of:
- Fully redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking, providing 99.99% availability, low latency and high throughput.
- Hyperconverged storage via the VMware vSAN stack on high-end, all-flash NVMe devices, which enables fast performance with the scale, availability, reliability and redundancy of a distributed storage system.
- Recent generation CPUs (2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors), delivering very high (2.6 GHz normal, 3.9 GHz burst) compute performance for workloads.
- 768 GB of RAM, and 19.2TB of raw data capacity per node.
It also provides integrated cloud networking so that VMware environments are configured through VPC subnets, and users can connect to workloads and services through direct, private, layer three networking. Furthermore, disaster recovery, backup, monitoring, security and other IT services are available from the GCP's third-party ecosystem.
VMware has a longstanding partnership with AWS for its virtualization wares. Previously, the company's tech also rolled out to Microsoft Azure shortly before GCP's May announcement. It now runs on all of the "big three" cloud computing platforms, though in different services with different capabilities. Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
VMware load is the prime load for all IaaS providers. This is not only because it is well structured and understood, but also because CIOs start new VMware instances without requiring their business users to test them. When starting these on the cloud, this creates migration of enterprise workloads to the cloud effectively, without the expensive part for a business to move to the cloud - retest the applications. Therefore, it is critical for all IaaS players to have great VMware support.
Currently, the Google Cloud VMware Engine is available in the us-east4 (Ashburn, Northern Virginia) and us-west2 (Los Angeles, California) regions, and the tech company will expand into other Google Cloud regions around the world in the second half of the year. As for pricing, customers have several options: on-demand (per hour), one- or three-year commitment, which includes the cost of infrastructure, licensing, and support.
