Running VMware in the cloud: How Google Cloud VMware Engine stacks up

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade, cloud-native VMware experience that is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud rapidly, easily, and with minimal modifications to their vSphere workloads, bringing the best of VMware and Google Cloud together on one platform for a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace.  

Here are seven ways VMware Engine outshines alternatives for running your VMware workloads in the cloud, simplify your operations, and help you innovate faster:

1. Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking  

Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes come with redundant switching and dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription of bandwidth, unlike other options where there is generally oversubscription. This is especially important when it comes to running latency-sensitive workloads. 

2. Four 9’s of availability in a single zone 

The service offers 99.99% uptime SLA for a cluster in a single Zone with five to 32 nodes and FTT=2 or more without the need for stretched clusters, which is higher than the alternatives. Further, dedicated connectivity for core service functions such as vSAN and vMotion enables better solution stability and availability. This enables the service to support the needs of enterprise workloads that require high availability.

Note: "Cluster" means a deployment of three or more dedicated bare metal nodes running VMware ESXi and associated networking managed via management interfaces.

3. Global networking without complex routing

Google Cloud VMware Engine networking is built based on Google Cloud’s powerful networking architecture. With simplified regional and global routing modes—which allow a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region where our service is available—you can architect global networks without the need or overhead of creating and connecting regional network designs. You get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them. In alternative cloud environments, you may have to configure special networking between regions, often requiring VPN-based tunnels over the WAN to enable global uniform network communication. This adds to the deployment and operational complexity, in addition to cost.

4. Integrated multi-VPC networking

Users often have application deployments in different VPC networks, such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to Google Cloud VMware Engine networks with multi-VPC networking, allowing you to retain existing deployed architectures and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments. In addition, by providing multi-VPC networking, you can pool their VMware needs—say for QA and dev—to a smaller set of clusters, effectively reducing their costs.

For more information about the end-to-end networking capabilities and services available in Google Cloud VMware Engine, please refer to the Private Cloud Networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine whitepaper. Here, you’ll find details about network flows, configuration options, and the differentiated benefits of running your VMware workloads in Google Cloud.

5. Unified, cloud-integrated model 

Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed Google first-party service, operated and supported by Google and its world-class team. With fully integrated identities, billing, and access control, you have a simpler end-to-end experience that is different from other services. You access Google Cloud VMware Engine service via the Google Cloud console, like any other Google Cloud service. You can also access other native Google Cloud services privately from your VMware private cloud running in Google Cloud VMware Engine over local connections.

6. Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility 

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can set up existing VMware on-premises third-party tools or products that require additional privileges by using a solution user account. This uniquely enables operational consistency, ensuring that the tools you have invested in and used over the years work on Google Cloud VMware Engine. Furthermore, in key areas such as vSAN data encryption, you have the choice of not only using Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)—which is turned on by default on vSAN datastores—but also external KMS providers such as HyTrust, Thales, and Fortanix. 

7. Dense nodes with high storage:core and memory:core ratios and fast provisioning

Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes are dense. Each node is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and comes with 36 cores, 72 hyperthreaded cores, 768 GB memory, 19.2 TB NVMe data and 3.2 TB NVMe cache storage. This, along with oversubscription, leads to high consolidation ratios and compelling storage:core per dollar and memory:core per dollar. In addition, you can rapidly spin up these nodes in a VMware private cloud often in under an hour, enabling on-demand, VMware-consistent capacity in Google Cloud for your needs.

These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure apart. In addition, migrating to Google cloud can save you up to 38% in TCO.Get started by learning about Google Cloud VMware Engine and your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the customers who have embarked upon this journey.

The authors would like to thank the Google Cloud VMware Engine product team for their contributions on this blog.