Google Cloud VMware Engine - What’s New: Increased commercial flexibility, ease of use and more

We’ve made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine in the past few months — today’s post provides a recap of our latest milestones making it easier and more cost-effective for you to migrate and run your vSphere workloads in a cloud-native enterprise-grade VMware environment in Google Cloud. 

In January, we announced Single node private cloud, additional regions, PCI-DSS and more.

Key updates this time around include:

• Inclusion of Google Cloud VMware Engine in VMware Cloud Universal subscription program for increased commercial flexibility
• Preview of automation with Google Cloud API/CLI support
• Advanced migration capabilities with VMware HCX enterprise features included, at no additional cost
• Custom core counts to optimize application licensing costs
• Service availability in Zurich, with additional regions planned in Asia, Europe and South America
• Traffic Director and Google Cloud VMware Engine integration for scaling web services and linking native GCP load balancers and the GCVE backends
• Dell PowerScale for GCVE is now available. This enables in-guest NFS, SMB, and HDFS to be accessed by GCVE VMs.
• Preview support for 96 node private clouds, stretch clusters and roadmap inclusion of additional compliance certifications.

Google Cloud VMware Engine inclusion in the VMware Cloud Universal subscription program: You can now purchase the Google Cloud VMware Engine offering as part of VMware Cloud Universal from VMware and VMware partners. The program can allow you to take advantage of savings through the VMware Cloud Acceleration Benefit and unused VMware Cloud Universal credits. It also allows streamlined consumption by enabling you to burn down your Google Cloud commits while purchasing from VMware. To learn more, please read this post.

Preview of Google Cloud API/CLI support for automation: Users can now enable automation at scale for VMware Engine infrastructure operations using Google Cloud API/CLI. It also enables you to manage these environments using a standard set of toolchain consistent with the rest of Google Cloud. If you are interested in participating in this public preview, please contact your Google account team.

Custom core counts to optimize application licensing costs: To help customers manage and optimize their application licensing costs on Google Cloud VMware Engine, we introduced a capability called custom core counts — giving you the flexibility to configure your clusters to help meet your application-specific licensing requirements and reduce costs. You can set the required number of CPU cores at the time of cluster creation, selecting from a range of options, thereby effectively reducing the number of cores you may have to license for that application. To learn more, please read this post.

Advanced migration capabilities with HCX enterprise features included, at no additional cost: Private cloud creation now uses the VMware HCX Enterprise license level by default, enabling premium migration capabilities. The more noteworthy of these features include HCX Replication Assisted vMotion that enables bulk, no-downtime migration from on-premises to Google Cloud VMware Engine and Mobility Optimized Networking that provides optimal traffic routing under certain scenarios to prevent network tromboning between the on-premises and cloud-based resources on extended networks. For more information on how to use HCX to migrate your workloads to Google Cloud VMware Engine, please read our documentation here.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Zurich region: This brings the availability of the service to 14 regions globally, enabling our multi-national and regional customers to leverage a VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service platform on Google Cloud. In each of these regions, we support 4-9’s of SLA in a single zone.

Traffic Director and Google Cloud VMware Engine integration: Traffic Director, a fully managed control plane for Service Mesh, can be combined with our portfolio of load balancers and with hybrid network endpoint groups (hybrid NEG) to provide a high-performance front-end for web services hosted in VMware Engine. Traffic Director can also serve as the glue that links the native GCP load balancers and the VMware Engine backends, enabling new services such as Cloud CDN, Cloud Armor and more. To learn more, please read this post.

Dell PowerScale for Google Cloud VMware Engine: Dell PowerScale is now available for in-guest access for VMware Engine VMs. This enables seamless migration from on-prem environments and provides customers more choice in scale-out storage for VMware Engine. PowerScale for Google Cloud in-guest access includes multiprotocol access with NFS, SMB, and HDFS, snapshots, native replication, AD integration, and shared storage between VMware Engine and Compute Engine instances. To learn more check out Dell PowerScale for Google Cloud and Google Cloud VMware Engine. 

Preview support for 96 node private clouds for increased scale, stretch clusters for HA and roadmap inclusion of additional compliance certifications.

• [Preview] Increasing scale from up to 64 nodes per private cloud to a maximum of 96 nodes per private cloud. This would enable larger customer environments to be supported with the same highly performant dedicated infrastructure and would increase operational efficiency by managing such large environments with a single vCenter server

• [Preview] With stretched clusters, a cluster would be deployed across two availability zones in a region, with synchronous replication, enabling higher levels of availability and failure independence.

• [Roadmap] Working on adding more compliance certifications - SOC1, Information System Security Management and Assessment Program (ISMAP), BSI:C5

Presence at VMware Explore 2022 and Google Next ‘22

We recently had the opportunity to connect with many of you and share these updates at VMware Explore in San Francisco. You can revisit our breakout sessions to learn more about how you can quickly migrate and transform your VMware workloads by viewing our on-demand content. You’ll find sessions that cover a plethora of topics including migration, transformation with Google Cloud services, security, backup and disaster recovery, and more. We also have an exciting line up of sessions and demos at VMware Explore in Barcelona in November - stay tuned for more information.

Join us at Google Next ‘22 for an exciting panel where you can hear how customers have used Google Cloud VMware Engine, which delivers a VMware stack running natively in Google Cloud without needing changes to existing applications, to reduce migration timelines, lower risk, and transform their businesses.

You can also 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. 

This brings us to the end of our updates this time around. For the latest updates to the service, please bookmark our release notes.