VMware Engine Extends Google’s Hybrid Push
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Google continues to expand its hybrid cloud partnership with VMware designed to ease migration of enterprise workloads to the cloud while preserving existing infrastructure.
Google Cloud this week unveiled additional support for migrating and running virtualized workloads in the cloud via a new VMware engine. The managed service delivers VMware’s Cloud Foundation stack, including the vSphere server virtualization, virtual storage area networking and VMware’s NSX-T software-defined infrastructure for cloud-native applications.
The virtualization engine extends hybrid cloud collaboration between Google Cloud and VMware launched last year and supplemented by Google’s November 2019 acquisition of Cloud Simple, which developed technology for running VMware workloads natively on Google Cloud.
Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) offers a similar cloud option for VMware (NYSE: VMW) users, as does Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT).
Similar to many of its hybrid cloud enhancements, the Google-developed VMware engine is positioned as differentiating the company from its cloud rivals as customers migrate demanding enterprise workloads to the cloud.
In a blog post, Google Cloud emphasized “high-bandwidth connectivity” via dedicated, redundant 100-Gbps networking. That feature is aimed at data-heavy training and inference workloads for machine learning applications that dominate most enterprise datacenters.
The managed “first-party” service covers the full VMware software stack along with infrastructure and upgrades, further tightening Google’s partnership with VMware as both seek to expand their hybrid cloud offerings. Google stressed that cloud migrators could continue using third-party services and management tools already installed on-premises.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) said it also is working with Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL), VMware’s majority shareholder, to support third-party tools.
The partners are promoting the expanded hybrid cloud offering as meeting growing demand for running VMware workloads in the cloud as customers look to leverage cloud scale and flexibility while preserving legacy infrastructure and consistency across hybrid and multiple public cloud deployments.
“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,” said Ajay Patel, general manager of VMware’s cloud provider software business unit.
