VMware technologies form the cornerstone of many customer’s enterprise IT environments, and those same enterprises are eager to run their VMware environments in the cloud to scale quickly and benefit from cloud services.

Last summer, we announced support for customers to run VMware workloads on Google Cloud, and we have made significant progress since then. In the fall we acquired CloudSimple to provide customers a fully integrated VMware-based solution, and today we’re proud to announce another significant milestone—Google Cloud VMware Engine, an integrated first-party offering with end-to-end support to migrate and run your VMware environment in Google Cloud. This fully managed service is expected to be generally available this quarter out of two US regions, expanding into additional Google Cloud regions globally in the second half of the year. 

Introducing Google Cloud VMware Engine

The service delivers a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack—VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX for cloud migration—in a dedicated environment on Google Cloud’s highly performant and reliable infrastructure to support enterprise production workloads. With this service, you can migrate or extend your on-premises workloads to Google Cloud in minutes by connecting to a dedicated VMware environment directly through the Google Cloud Console. This allows you to seamlessly migrate to the cloud without the cost or complexity of refactoring applications, and run and manage workloads consistently with your on-premises environment. By running your VMware workloads on Google Cloud, you reduce your operational burden while benefiting from scale and agility, and maintain continuity with your existing tools, policies, and processes. 

Importantly, you can quickly meet your business needs by creating a VMware SDDC environment on Google Cloud in a matter of minutes, enabling you to scale business critical applications on-demand. The service is VMware Cloud Verified, the highest level of validation for VMware-based cloud services, to help enable compatibility and operational continuity across on-premises and cloud environments. 

“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.” 

A differentiated VMware experience

Google Cloud VMware Engine is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant, scalable infrastructure with fully redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking, providing 99.99% availability to meet the needs of your most demanding enterprise workloads. Cloud networking services such as Interconnect and VPN ease access from your on-premises environments to the cloud and high-bandwidth connectivity to cloud services optimize for performance and flexibility while minimizing costs and operational overhead. End-to-end, one stop support is integrated to provide a seamless experience across this service and the rest of Google Cloud.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is designed to minimize your operational burden, so you can focus on your business. 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. We’re partnering closely with leading storage, backup, and disaster recovery providers such as NetApp, Actifio, Veeam, Zerto, Cohesity, and Dell Technologies to ensure support for third-party solutions, ease the migration journey, and enable business continuity.

An integrated Google Cloud experience

In addition to the ease of migration, you can benefit from full access to innovative Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Anthos, and Cloud AI. Billing, identity management, and access control are also fully integrated into Google Cloud to unify the experience with other Google Cloud products and services. As you look to migrate and modernize workloads over time, these cloud-native services allow you to streamline management, surface new data insights, and deliver new and innovative services to your customers. 

Unlocking business value

Over the past few months, we’ve engaged with numerous customers through our early access program. Customers have experienced first-hand the rapid and simple migration that Google Cloud VMware Engine enables as they look to extend or migrate workloads into the cloud. Capital markets infrastructure provider Deutsche Börse Group was impressed by the ease and simplicity of migrating VMware workloads to Google Cloud.

“As one of the world’s largest market infrastructure providers, implementing innovative and resilient solutions for financial markets is key when it comes to maintaining efficient, stable and most important secure operations,” says Dr. Christoph Böhm, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Information Officer, Deutsche Börse Group. “As a long-term VMware customer we are keen to extend our large landscape towards hyperscaling options, keeping existing control planes and lifecycle management stable. Google Cloud VMware Engine allows us now to quickly extend our VMware environment to Google Cloud, one of Deutsche Börse’s public cloud partners, increasing our business agility and building even higher levels of resiliency. The steps we have gone through so far together are hugely encouraging, giving us innovative and flexible ways in running hybrid cloud scenarios.”

QAD, a leading ERP software provider, is also excited about the benefits of running VMware on Google Cloud. “With Google Cloud VMware Engine, we are able to quickly extend our VMware-based platform to Google Cloud to meet our goal of being rapid, agile and effective,” says Scott Lawson, Director, IT Architecture at QAD. “As a leading ERP software provider, partnering with Google Cloud and VMware allows us to reduce our operational burden, improve our disaster recovery capabilities to ensure consistent availability for our customers, and benefit from native Google Cloud services to continuously innovate.” 

Enabling customer success through our partner ecosystem

We’re proud to partner closely with regional and global system integrators to simplify and enable the success of our mutual customers’ cloud migration journey. Our partners such as Deloitte, Atos, and WWT are committed to building cloud services to help customers adopt Google Cloud VMware Engine and accelerate their digital transformation through native Google Cloud services. 

Partners can play an essential role to accelerate migration and help you achieve faster time-to-value.  “As customers look to simplify their cloud migration journey, we’re committed to build cloud services to help customers benefit from the increased agility and efficiency of running VMware workloads on Google Cloud,” said Bob Black, Dell Technologies Global Lead Alliance Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “By combining Google Cloud’s technology and Deloitte’s business transformation experience, we can enable our joint customers to accelerate their cloud migration, unify operations, and benefit from innovative Google Cloud services as they look to modernize applications.” 

Partners also see Google Cloud VMware Engine as a key offering to help customers accelerate their cloud journey. “Running VMware workloads on Google Cloud is a priority for many enterprise customers as they look to benefit from the scale and agility of the cloud while maintaining consistency across hybrid and multi cloud environments,” said Peter Cutts, SVP, Digital Transformation Officer, Atos Cloud Enterprise Solutions. “We are excited for the opportunity to reinforce our partnership with Google Cloud by combining all the value Atos brings to VMware and Google to provide a differentiated experience while enabling customers to benefit from turnkey offerings including cloud native services such as BigQuery, AI & machine learning.”

“As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, we are excited about the addition of Google Cloud VMware Engine to the ever-growing list of services already driving value to our mutual customers,” said Michael Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, World Wide Technology. Technology. “Hybrid cloud strategies continue to be a focal point for our customers and this offering substantially accelerates the timeframe for organizations to move their workloads to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure.

Getting started 

Google Cloud VMware Engine is expected to be generally available to customers this quarter in the North Virginia (us-east4) and Los Angeles (us-west2) regions. We plan for the service to be available globally in eight additional regions—London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Montréal, São Paulo, Singapore, and Netherlands—in the second half of the calendar year.

We are excited for this milestone and committed to delivering an optimum platform to run your VMware workloads alongside Google Cloud services to solve business problems and innovate in new areas. 

You can find more information including product features and resources on our website. We also invite you to join us for our upcoming webinar where we will provide a more detailed overview of the service, dive into key use cases, and discuss how you can accelerate your cloud migration journey. We look forward to connecting with you.