Editor’s note: This the first installment in a new blog series that dives deep into our Google Cloud VMware Engine managed service. Stay tuned for other entries on migration, integration, running stateful database workloads, and enabling remote workers, to name a few.

We recently announced the general availability of Google Cloud VMware Engine, a managed VMware platform service that enables enterprises to lift and shift their VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without changes to application architectures, tools or processes. With VMware Engine, you can deploy a private cloud—an isolated VMware stack—that consists of three or more nodes, enabling you to run VMware Cloud Foundation platform natively. This approach lets you retire or extend your data center to the cloud, use the cloud as a disaster recovery target, or migrate and modernize workloads by integrating with cloud-native services such as BigQuery, Cloud AI, etc.

But before you can do that, you need easy-to-provision, high-performance, highly available networking to connect between:

• On-premises data centers and the cloud

• VMware workloads and cloud-native services

• VMware private clouds in single or multi-region deployments.

Google Cloud VMware Engine networking leverages existing connectivity services for on-premises connections and provides seamless connectivity to other Google Cloud services. Furthermore, the service is built on high-performance, reliable and high-capacity infrastructure, giving you a fast and highly available VMware experience, at a low cost.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the networking features you’ll find on VMware Engine. 

High Availability and 100G throughput

Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds are deployed on enterprise-grade infrastructure with redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking that provides 99.99% availability, low latency and high throughput.

Integrated networking and on-prem connectivity 

Subnets associated with private clouds are allocated in Google Cloud VPCs and delegated to VMware Engine. As a result, Compute Engine instances in the VPC communicate with VMware workloads using RFC 1918 private addresses, with no need for External IP-based addressing. 

Private clouds can be accessed from on-prem using existing Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect-based connections to Google Cloud VPCs without additional VPN or Interconnect attachments to VMware Engine private clouds. You can also stretch your on-prem networks to VMware Engine to facilitate workload migration.

Furthermore, for internet access, you can choose to use VMware Engine’s internet access service or route internet-bound traffic from on-prem to meet your security or regulatory needs.

Access to Google Cloud services from VMware Engine private clouds

VMware Engine workloads can access other Google Cloud services such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, etc., using options such as Private Google Access and Private Service Access. Just like a Compute Engine instance in a VPC, a VMware workload can use private access options to communicate with Google Cloud services while staying within a secure and trusted Google Cloud network boundary. As such, you don’t need to exit out to the public internet to access Google Cloud services from VMware Engine, regardless of whether internet access is enabled or disabled. This provides for low-latency and secure communication between VMware Engine and other Google Cloud services.

Multi-region connectivity between VMware private clouds 

VMware workloads in private clouds in the same region can talk to one another directly—without needing to “trombone” or “hairpin” across the Google Cloud VPCs. In the case where VMware workloads need to communicate with one another across regions, they can do so using VMware Engine’s global routing service. This approach to multi-region connectivity doesn’t require a VPN, or any other latency-inducing connectivity options. 

Access to full NSX-T functionality

VMware Engine supports full NSX-T functionality for VMware workloads. With this, you can use VMware’s NSX-T policy-based UI or API to create network segments, gateway firewall policies or distributed/east-west firewall policies. In addition, you can also leverage NSX-T’s load balancer, NAT and service insertion functionality. 

Networking is critical to any Enterprise’s cloud transformation journey—even more so for VMware-related use cases. The networking functionality in VMware Engine makes it easy for you to take advantage of the scale, flexibility and agility that Google Cloud provides without compromising on functionality.

What’s next

In the coming weeks, we’ll share more about VMware Engine and migration, building business resiliency, enabling work from anywhere, and your enterprise database options. To learn more or to get started, visit the VMware Engine website where you’ll find detailed information on key features, use cases, product documentation, and pricing.