VMware Cloud Foundation on Google Cloud VMware Engine: 20% lower price and up to 40% in migration incentives

VMware Cloud Foundation on Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is now generally available, and there has never been a better time to move your VMware workloads to Google Cloud, so you can bring down your costs and benefit from a modern cloud experience. Today, in partnership with Broadcom, we’re pleased to announce:

• Support for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is now available with ~20% lower commitment pricing

• License portability entitlement support for VCF will allow you to preserve your VMware investments by flexibly porting your on-premises VCF licenses to GCVE. This will enable you to get a VE1 node which supports portability at up to a 35% lower price¹ on a three-year prepaid commitment, compared to previous pricing which included VMware licenses.

• Multiple new GCVE node types to cost-effectively align with your workload requirements; in fact, GCVE (with VCF) can be up to 30% less expensive than Azure VMware Solution. 

• Commercial incentives up to 40% of GCVE first-year spend as additional migration and consumption incentives, along with no-fee proof of concepts and trials

• Convertible commitments supporting movement mid-term between different GCVE node types and other compute platforms like Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Customers are already benefiting from VCF licensing support in GCVE. 

"Google has helped us navigate the VMware licensing changes every step of the way and we are excited about the future with Google Cloud VMware Engine providing us a fast path to transform our VMware workloads in Google Cloud." - Everett Chesley, Director of IT Infrastructure, Granite Telecommunications

Let’s take a look at these announcements in greater depth. 

Support for VMware Cloud Foundation

In partnership with Broadcom, GCVE now fully supports VMware Cloud Foundation. VCF is a comprehensive platform that integrates VMware's compute, storage, and network virtualization capabilities with its management and application infrastructure capabilities. In addition to the cloud infrastructure components such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX and HCX that already existed in GCVE, VCF includes many new capabilities, such as the Aria Suite Enterprise and Aria Operations for Networks Enterprise. These Aria capabilities provide comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and insights to optimize application performance and resource utilization, resulting in improved application health, enhanced performance, and efficient capacity management. 

VMware Cloud Foundation license portability

We often hear from customers looking to bring the value of their existing or future VMware Cloud Foundation license investments to Google Cloud. In collaboration with Broadcom, we are pleased to announce support for VCF license portability entitlement in GCVE. Simply put, with GCVE commitment types that support portability, you only pay Google for the VMware Engine service and infrastructure, and can apply previously purchased VCF licenses. By bringing your own VCF subscriptions to GCVE, you can avoid the cost of purchasing new licenses, resulting in potential savings compared to previous pricing models. For example, compared to previous pricing which included VMware licenses, you will be able to get a VE1 node that supports portability at up to a 35% lower price on a three-year prepaid commitment.

Google Cloud is the first cloud provider to offer a distinct VCF-integrated solution that supports VCF license portability. With Google Cloud, you can maximize the value of your VMware investments while benefiting from the scalability, security, and innovation of Google’s infrastructure.

“The partnership between Broadcom and Google Cloud continues to deliver significant value to our customers. Support for VMware Cloud Foundation and license portability entitlement with Google Cloud VMware Engine empowers on-premises customers to leverage their existing investments in VMware software to both cost effectively and seamlessly migrate to Google Cloud. This innovation not only unlocks substantial cost savings and TCO benefits but also accelerates customers’ digital transformation journey.” - Abhay Kumar, Global Head of Hyperscalers, Broadcom

Increased choice of node types

Over the years, customers have shared the need to support a range of VMware workloads with better capacity shaping to optimize their costs. Earlier this year, we introduced our first node type on the VE2 node platform, the ve2-standard-128.  

Today, we’re excited to introduce our ve2-mega shape family. ve2-mega shapes come with 51.2 TB raw data storage (~2.7X compared to ve1) in addition to 3.2TB of cache capacity. We are now offering two new hyperconverged node types in the family:

• ve2-mega-96, with 96 hyperthreads (~1.3X compared to ve1-standard-72).
• ve2-mega-128, with 128 hyperthreads (~1.7X compared to ve1-standard-72).

We’re also now offering ve2-standard-96, with 48 cores/96 hyperthreaded cores. ve2-standard shapes come with 25.6 TB raw data storage.

For workloads with high storage needs, we are now offering two new storage-only node types: ve2-standard-so with 25.6 TB raw data storage, and ve2-mega-so with 51.2 TB raw data storage. GCVE storage-only node types come with the same NVMe storage offered in our hyperconverged node types, but are offered at lower price points. You can easily and cost-effectively expand your storage capacity by adding storage-only node types to your existing GCVE clusters. You get the same blazing fast performance with ease of management — no need to manage any external connectivity or mounts.

Please contact your Google Cloud sales representative for more information.

New cost savings with commitments

GCVE now offers enhanced discounting for its VE1 and VE2 license-included node platforms with new one- and three-year term commitments:

• VE1 nodes: 22% lower rates compared to previous pricing¹

• VE2 nodes:

• 37% discount for one-year prepaid commitments (previously 30% for VE1)

• 55% discount for three-year prepaid commitments (previously 50% for VE1)

These changes result in substantial savings, For example, for ve1-standard-72, a three-year prepaid commitment in us-central1 (Iowa) is priced at $3.60/hour compared to $5.17/hour for Azure's AV36P three-year reserved instance in the “Central US” location (~30% savings)*.

Please contact your Google Cloud sales representative for more information.

Significant incentives to reduce TCO

Customers evaluating GCVE as a destination for their VMware workloads want a significant reduction in financial and technical friction. We worked closely with several of our key services partners to enable us to deliver on this requirement, and are pleased to announce:

• No-fee assessments and POCs for customers, delivered by our partners and funded by Google Cloud

• For new customers entering a Google Cloud Enterprise Agreement or Flex Agreement:

• Migration services incentives: up to 25% of incremental year-one net spend to support migration services. A number of partners are certified to deliver migration services.

• Incremental consumption incentives: up to 15% in additional credits for incremental net consumption of GCVE in year one, reducing TCO for customers as they migrate their VMware workloads.

Please contact your Google Cloud sales representative for more information.

Convertible commitments

As customers bring their workloads to GCVE, they often evolve their workload architectures to take advantage of various options available in Google Cloud. However, so far, they were unable to reuse their existing GCVE commitments for such use cases. To support this flexibility, we are excited to announce new convertible three-year GCVE commitments that, for an additional cost, will allow you to convert part of your commitments to other services such as Compute Engine or GKE, or other options in GCVE. For example:

• You can extend VMware environments using dynamically scaling web-facing servers on Compute Engine or GKE.

• With the flexible VE2 node platform in GCVE, you can move between different GCVE node types, thus optimizing resource utilization by matching workloads to the most suitable infrastructure as your architecture evolves.

For pricing and regional availability details, please contact your Google Cloud sales representative.

Please stay tuned for more and be sure to bookmark the GCVE release notes for updates. You can also learn even more at our Google Cloud VMware Engine website, and if you’re looking to explore what a migration might look like for you, sign up for our free discovery & assessment offer.

<sup>*As of July 2024, based on list prices
1. Google Cloud Internal Data, May 2024</sup>