VMware Engine

Broadcom’s VMware license changes as they relate to Google Cloud VMware Engine

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Broadcom recently announced a change to its VMware licensing model for hyperscalers, moving to an exclusive “bring your own” subscription model for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) starting on November 1, 2025. This means that in the future, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) customers will need to purchase portable VCF subscriptions directly from Broadcom to use with Google Cloud VMware Engine instead of buying VCF-included subscriptions of GCVE.

Google Cloud already offers a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) option for GCVE. In fact, we were the first hyperscaler to do so, in 2024.

For any new CUDs purchased after October 15, 2025, you’ll need to purchase the VCF licenses directly from Broadcom and the BYOL option of the GCVE service from Google Cloud.

Helpful resources

We stand ready to help you navigate these changes. Here are some additional resources to guide you:

Google Cloud VMware Engine: Learn more about the service and options:

Google Cloud VMware Engine product page
Google Cloud VMware Engine pricing: Details on pricing, including the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) options and committed use discounts (CUDs)
CUDs for VMware Engine

Your Google Cloud Account Team: Please reach out to your Google Cloud account team, who can help review your existing commitments, discuss the implications of these changes for your organization, and help you plan for a smooth transition.

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

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

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.

^{*As of July 2024, based on list prices
1. Google Cloud Internal Data, May 2024}

How to set up Google Cloud VMware Engine regional disaster recovery with VMware Site Recovery Manager

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:00:00 +0000

As a VMware admin, you understand the importance of business continuity and minimizing downtime. Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) customers have several options of tools to choose from (such as GCVE Protected, Zerto, Veeam replication, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and other third-party tools) based on their RTO and RPO needs. Of these, VMware SRM is a popular way to enable disaster recovery (DR) in GCVE multi-region deployments. In this blog post, we present a guide to setting up SRM within GCVE, enabling failover and failback of your VMs between Google Cloud regions for DR purposes.

Architecture

Before we dive into implementation, let’s take a moment to review the architecture of GCVE and SRM. The following diagram shows an overview of GCVE Private Clouds configured with an SRM Deployment:

This architecture represents deployment of a primary Private Cloud (PC) in one region with the DR PC deployed to a separate region with connectivity between the PCs using a Standard VMware Engine Network. The SRM and vSphere Replication appliances are deployed to a service subnet within the PC for faster networking speeds as opposed to deploying the appliances within a network segment of the NSX-T Tier1 router. Cloud DNS is used for resolution of the SRM and vSphere replication appliances being deployed within the PCs.

Prerequisites

Before deploying the solution there are a few prerequisite steps we need to ensure are completed:

GCVE API enabled in a project on Google Cloud
Two GCVE PCs are deployed in different regions
VMware Engine Network deployed and connected to the PCs
Downloaded SRM and vSphere Replication appliances OVAs
Licenses for SRM

Set up disaster recovery for SRM

Now let's jump in and deploy SRM to enable regional site recovery for GCVE.

1. Assign address ranges for subnet Service-1(or preferred service subnet) image2

2. Create a port group in vCenter for the subnet; this requires a solution user account. (You’ll need the VLAN ID of Service-1 subnet for the creation of the port group.) image3

3. Repeat Service Subnet creation in the DR PC per the instructions above.

4. Create private DNS zones within Cloud DNS for record lookups of the SRM and vSphere replication appliances. The DNS zones should be attached to the customer controlled VPC (SRM requires both forward and reverse lookups between vCenter, SRM, and vSphere replication appliances at both sites).

5. Create DNS records for the appliances within each zone.

Reverse-lookup record:

6. Update the binding for the private zones to the intranet VPC of the VMware Engine network. This facilitates DNS resolution for the appliances in the PCs. Once the bindings have been created, you can leverage the DNS server address within each private cloud as the DNS address for configuration within the SRM and vSphere replication appliances.

7. Log in to vCenter with a user that has similar permissions as the CloudOwner Role and deploy the vSphere Replication Appliance OVA. Be sure to leverage the Distributed port group that you created using service-1 subnet as the network. Repeat this at the DR site.

8. After successful deployment of the vSphere Replication appliances, log in and perform the configuration. If you used the shortname for the hostname on the appliance during the deployment, make sure to update the network settings in the configuration with the FQDN of the appliance. You will also need to use a solution-user account for connecting to vCenter in the configuration. Perform the configuration at both sites.

9. After configuration, log in to vCenter and navigate to Menu -> Site Recovery Manager and validate that vSphere Replication status is OK at both sites.

10. Log in to vCenter with a user that has similar permissions as the CloudOwner Role and deploy the SRM Appliance OVA. Be sure to leverage the Distributed port group that you created using service-1 subnet as the network. Repeat this at the DR site.

11. After successful deployment of the SRM appliances, log in and perform the configuration. If you used the shortname for the hostname on the appliance during the deployment make sure to update the network settings in the configuration with the FQDN of the appliance. You will also need to use a solution-user account for connecting to vCenter in the configuration. Perform the configuration at both sites.

12. After configuration log in to vCenter and navigate to Menu -> Site Recovery Manager and validate that Site Recovery Manager status is OK at both sites.

Now that the vSphere Replication and SRM appliances have been deployed and their status has been verified at both sites, you should be able to go into SRM to perform the site pairing between the two regions and configure the replication of VMs.

By following this guide, you should now be able to leverage the combined power of VMware SRM and Google Cloud VMware Engine to build a robust and reliable disaster recovery solution for your Google Cloud vSphere environments. Don't wait for a disaster to strike. Mitigate risk and protect your critical workloads by implementing disaster recovery on Google Cloud VMware Engine with SRM today.

What’s new with Google Cloud VMware Engine: New node type, networking, automation and more

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks, we had the unique opportunity to connect with many of you at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, and Google Cloud Next in San Francisco. One common theme that emerged from these conversations is the continued need to have a cost-effective, secure, and non-disruptive path to the cloud, especially for VMware-based workloads which are often at the core of your IT footprint.

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides one of the fastest ways to lift and transform your existing VMware estate into Google Cloud. VMware Engine is an enterprise-grade platform with unique capabilities like 4 nine’s of uptime SLA in a single zone, 100 Gbps of dedicated, east-west networking, native VPC integration and more. Today’s post provides a summary of new and recent capabilities that will enable you to migrate and run your VMware workloads on a cloud-first VMware platform.

New Flexible ve2 node platform

VMware Engine’s ve2 node platform will be offered with many flexible combinations of CPU and storage, with high memory, enabling customers to optimize their TCO with the right configuration for their business. Based on next-generation CPU (3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (formerly named Ice Lake) with DDR4 RAM with all-NVMe drives, ve2 nodes will also support large cluster sizes of 32 nodes and 100+ node private clouds. They will also continue providing 4 9’s of uptime SLA, in a single zone. For higher availability, stretched private clouds will also be supported.
(Preview in us-east4 in early Q4’2023) Our first node type within this new family is ve2-standard-128 which offers more than ~2.7X the RAM (2048 GB), ~1.8X the CPU (64 cores, 128 hyperthreaded cores) and ~1.3X the storage: 25.6 TB NVMe raw data storage at a compelling price point.

New locations for broader reach

Over the past year, we have increased our global presence to 19 regions, with the most recent ones being Tel Aviv, Turin, Santiago and Delhi.

Optimizing TCO for storage-heavy environments

(Preview Q3’2023 in select regions): Storage Only Nodes overcome the limitation of HCI architectures by letting you add storage capacity without having to pay for compute. This lowers TCO and optimizes the infrastructure to match the workload needs much better. Storage Only Nodes deliver a lower cost option to expand storage capacity of a cluster without adding cores/memory in storage capacity constrained clusters with the same 4 9’s of uptime SLA for the cluster.
Recent developments also include support from Google Cloud Filestore as datastores and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for in-guest storage use to cater to storage-intensive environments. Filestore High Scale and Filestore Enterprise are VMware-certified as an NFS datastore with Google Cloud VMware Engine. Similar to Filestore High Scale and Enterprise, the marketplace service NetApp Cloud Volumes can be leveraged as an NFS Datastore for the capacity-hungry VMs.

More simplicity, scale and consistency through networking, automation and console experience

Newly introduced Terraform support for PC CRUD operations enables Infrastructure as Code automation for private cloud provisioning activities.
(Preview Q3’2023) Advancements in networking are further simplifying the VMware networking architecture and experience in VMware Engine. With zero-config VPC peering during private cloud creation, as well as increasing the limits on the number of peerings allowed, it radically simplifies the task of building a connected VMware Private Cloud while enabling a variety of networking topologies. The addition of native Cloud DNS support for bi-directional DNS resolution for both management and workload resolution and support for more than 1 consumer DNS binding will also deliver enterprise needs in a simple and elegant fashion.
(Preview Q3’2023) With more functionality delivered via Google Cloud API and CLI will enable users to programmatically manage their Google Cloud VMware Engine environments — these include API/CLI functions for managing the new networking model, network peering, external access rules and external IP service, consumer DNS and more.
(Preview Q3’2023) Full Google cloud console experience for GCVE enables customers to manage their VMware Engine environments directly inside the console without the need to open another tab. In addition, you would view logs in the log explorer.

Improving security through more transparency and control

Over the past few months, new security capabilities have been added to VMware Engine.

Fine-grained (per-action) access control capabilities into our platform for those actions performed via API/CLI. You can select from predefined roles and custom roles in addition to basic roles — these predefined or custom roles have more fine-grained permissions to perform specific actions that apply only to VMware Engine. This way you have more control and flexibility over access control. The same will apply to those actions performed via the console once it becomes available.
VPC Service Controls let you define a security perimeter for your VMware Engine resources to reduce data exfiltration risks. The service perimeter limits exporting and importing of resources and their associated data to within the defined perimeter. VMware Engine now supports a VPC Service Controls guided opt-in and policy export that enables you to attach VMware Engine services to a new or existing VPC Service Controls perimeter.
More system transparency with support for ESXi log forwarding and enabling auditable procedures with customer controlled access elevation on customer workloads.
(Preview) Adding more options for key management for vSAN encryption in GCVE with customer managed keys for Cloud KMS. This builds upon the already available capabilities of external 3P KMS with customer managed keys and Google Cloud KMS with Google managed keys.

Google Cloud VMware Engine Protected

We recently announced GCVE Protected, a new Google Cloud offering that offers bundled pricing for both Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud’s Backup & DR Service. With GCVE Protected, you can protect all your virtual machines on a VMware Engine node with our first-party backup and DR software for only an incremental add-on cost per VMware Engine node, giving you centralized, fast, and cost-efficient backup and recovery capabilities for your VMware Engine VMs.

This wraps up the updates for this time around. Please stay tuned for more and be sure to bookmark the GCVE release notes for updates. You can learn more about these recent updates by viewing our on-demand sessions from VMware Explore US as well as our session on GCVE at Google Cloud Next’23. Additionally, if you are looking to get started but need some guidance, be sure to check out our Rapid Migration Program (RaMP), or if you’re ready to rock n’ roll, click here to get started with a free discovery and assessment of your current IT landscape so we can help craft the right migration plan for your business.

What’s new with VMware Engine: New regions and more capabilities for storage, availability, data protection and more

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

IT leaders today are being asked to simultaneously support their company’s infrastructure, find opportunities for growth, and meet their goals with fewer resources and smaller budgets than before. Recently we highlighted three customers who are leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine to achieve these goals while lowering their TCO and transforming their organization.

It’s because of these successful customer outcomes that we have been awarded the 2023 VMware Cloud Innovation and SaaS Transformation partner achievement award for delivering solutions that accelerate customers’ digital transformation journey. We’re honored to receive this award and continue to stay focused on delivering tremendous value to our customers.

In the past few months, we’ve also made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Today’s post provides a recap of the latest milestones that make it easier for you to migrate and run your vSphere workloads in a cloud-first, enterprise-class VMware environment in Google Cloud.

Back in September 2022, we announced a number of updates including the preview of API/CLI support (which is now available). In February 2023, we also talked about how to use NetApp CVS as datastores for VMware Engine.

Key updates this time around include:

Availability of VMware Engine in Delhi, Santiago and Milan regions: This brings the availability of VMware Engine to 17 regions worldwide, each supporting 4 9’s of uptime SLA for clusters 5 or more, serving the needs of our regional and multi-national customers. In addition, we have also added a second zone in the London region.

Filestore datastore support for VMware Engine: Generally Available in all VMware Engine regions, you can use Filestore High Scale and Enterprise tier instances as external NFS datastores for VMware Engine nodes. Filestore is VMware certified as an NFS datastore with VMware Engine. You can size compute and storage capacity independently to meet your workload requirements for your storage-intensive VMs. You can also leverage vSAN for low-latency VM requirements and scale Filestore from TBs to PBs for the capacity hungry VMs. If interested in this feature, please contact your Google account team.

Stretched private clouds: These private clouds stretch across two data zones and a witness zone all within the same Google Cloud region. Stretched private clouds use vSphere and vSAN stretched clusters to provide compute and storage high availability against zone-level failures. This capability is now available in Frankfurt and Sydney regions. Learn more here.

Zerto solution version 9.5u1 support: This recovery solution allows critical infrastructure and application virtual machines (VMs) to be replicated continuously from your on-premises vCenter to your private cloud. Learn more about setting up Zerto here.

Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (GCBDR): GCBDR is available to protect applications running in VMware Engine, and can be managed within the Google Cloud Console. We recently launched GCBDR under Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service simplifying customers’ purchasing and support experience.

vTPM support: Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds now support the addition of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 virtual cryptoprocessor to a virtual machine. You can add vTPMs to VMs by following VMware instructions or upgrading your existing VMs to include a vTPM. You can read more about this in the VMware blog.

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

Helping Arapahoe County operate more efficiently with Google Cloud

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 12:44:00 +0000

Arapahoe, Colorado's first county, has been focused on cultivating growth opportunities for its residents for more than 150 years¹. Home to roughly 655,000 people from diverse backgrounds, Arapahoe County is projected to be one of the largest counties in Colorado within ten years². The County supports a variety of industries, including ranching, technology, and aviation with Centennial Airport – one of the 10 busiest general aviation airports in the nation. To serve its growing population and economy at scale, Arapahoe County needed a better way to manage its rising data center maintenance costs while balancing flat year-over-year budgets.

The County recognizes that maintaining its data centers will increase operational expenditures for the next five years, a problem that would undermine its mission. To help operate more efficiently, Arapahoe County partnered with Google Cloud – announcing a five-year agreement to migrate two costly data centers to Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). This transition is estimated to help Arapahoe County save millions of dollars and help solidify the county's financial viability for years to come

Modernizing infrastructure for more cost-effective & efficient services

Arapahoe County’s migration to the cloud is part of its shift toward embracing digital technologies as a way to bring government services to residents in a more efficient and effective way. The County will work with Google Cloud and premier cloud partner SADA to support a successful migration to Google Cloud throughout its five-year journey.

The County chose GCVE because it offered a risk-free way to move workloads into the cloud in a rapid and agile fashion, and a Google-provided subscription agreement guaranteed cost predictability. Moving to GCVE will also allow the County to leverage its existing IT talent for disaster recovery and production workloads.

A familiar platform lets IT teams focus on mission-critical work

Arapahoe County employees are learning Google Cloud platform and tools, which will help cut down on training and speed up the timeline for implementation. Working on Google Cloud platform will also help free up IT teams to work on other critical county initiatives.

Google Cloud’s VMware Engine allows agencies to easily lift and shift their VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without changes to existing apps, tools, or processes. This means the migration will maintain the same level of security, compliance, and performance agencies expect from their existing VMware environment. It also unlocks access to Google Cloud’s global network, which offers advanced security features and machine learning capabilities, nurturing growth opportunities for Arapahoe County’s digital future.

Powering the future of Arapahoe County

Arapahoe County’s community-focused drive to cultivate sustainable and diverse growth opportunities will create a bright future for its residents. Google Public Sector is proud to partner with them and looks forward to powering new ways to reimagine serving both current and future residents.

To learn more about our solutions for state and local government, visit the Google Cloud for state and local government page.

_{1: https://www.arapahoegov.com/94/About
2: https://www.arapahoegov.com/2241/Arapahoe-County-Where-Good-Things-Grow}

What Google Cloud VMware Engine can do for you: Three customers talk TCO

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 17:00:00 +0000

The first step in many digital transformation initiatives is migrating workloads to the cloud to improve business resiliency and speed, modernize applications, and gain flexible, on-demand scale. That first step can seem daunting. But for many of our customers running VMware on premises — including ADT, LIQ, and Viant — it can actually be quite straightforward to migrate to the cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine.

In this blog post, we'll look at how these three companies take advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine to migrate their VMware-based applications to the cloud without changes to their apps, tools, or processes, while lowering their total cost of ownership.

How VMware Engine makes migration seamless

Since we launched Google Cloud VMware Engine in 2020, we have enabled end-to-end support for customers to migrate and transform their VMware environments in Google Cloud. Google Cloud VMware Engine is a Google first-party service that delivers a fully managed, enterprise-grade VMware experience built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. Google Cloud VMware Engine includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, HCX, and corresponding tools, so it's fully compatible with existing processes and skills, all delivered on high-performance, dedicated infrastructure.

By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud with minimal change to on-premises vSphere workloads, typically in under an hour with just a few clicks. Read on to see how customers are benefiting from the service:

ADT: Accelerating data queries and lowering opex by 76% with Google Cloud VMware Engine and BigQuery

Leading home security provider ADT chose to work with Google Cloud to streamline infrastructure sourcing and procurement and drive digital transformation. Although ADT was 97% virtualized, capacity management was always challenging, requiring large capital expenditures to deliver new services and streamline its IT environment. Starting with a new disaster recovery environment, the company has been shifting its applications to Google Cloud VMware Engine to consolidate data centers and avoid sprawl.

The evolution has given ADT one-click simplicity for spinning up new environments, interoperability and portability between on-premises and cloud environments, reduced maintenance needs, and access to native Google Cloud services such as BigQuery. The move accelerated data query times 20-30X — from hours to seconds — through Google Cloud VMware Engine and BigQuery while reducing operating expenses for running applications by 76% annually.

"The ability to increase capacity with automated scripting, as well as private and cross-connected networks, has been a huge advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine," says Alex Bingham, ADT’s IT Director, Cloud Services. "Standing up a Google Cloud VMware Engine environment is extremely easy and more streamlined than I've seen in nearly 20 years."

LIQ: Reducing pricing runtime by 90% with Google Cloud VMware Engine

In 2020, customer relationship management (CRM) company LIQ sought to update its 600 servers, reduce idle processing capability, and ensure a flexible structure, independent from physical space. After researching alternatives, LIQ chose Google Cloud VMware Engine for its potential functional improvements and comprehensive support throughout the migration journey.

"We needed to update and modernize our data center, meet new business demands in an agile, secure way, and keep our service up and running during any necessary operational changes," says Nicolas Ramirez, Head of Technology and Innovation. "We discussed all this and, based on surveys we conducted, it became clear to us that partnering with Google would make a lot of sense." The company began by migrating 180 servers, followed by 80% of the business application environments and 50% of its total informational environments in just three months.

In a short period of time, LIQ has seen a 60% savings in overall infrastructure costs, including a 92% reduction in storage expenses, and a 90% runtime reduction for its pricing process. Next up? Application modernization.

Viant: Just 7 weeks to a new data center and a faster and more reliable site with Google Cloud VMware Engine

Advertising software company Viant Technology faced a potential crisis when the data center housing all of their servers was shutting down. The company had just six months to plan and execute the move of 600 virtual machines (VMs), 200+TB of data, 80+ MSSQL databases, and 100 physical servers running multiple operating systems.

Within 24 hours, Google Cloud’s Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP) provided a complete inventory from which to plan, even identifying cost and redundancy reductions. Notes Viant's CIO Linh Chung, "The fact that this was a Google offering gave us an additional level of comfort because we had the assurance of the Google infrastructure."

In all, Viant moved an entire data center into Google Cloud VMware Engine in seven weeks rather than the scheduled ten. Once on Google Cloud, Viant discovered that its site runs far faster and significantly more reliably. Viant no longer needs to maintain unique hardware, make manual upgrades to its VMware software, or worry about servers breaking down. And the capital expense Viant saved on migration essentially paid for a full year’s worth of usage in Google Cloud. With Google Cloud VMware Engine’s high-performance infrastructure, Viant’s user-facing sites ran faster than in their previous paradigm.

Google Cloud VMware Engine: Your onramp to digital transformation

These are just three of the many customers who have discovered how Google Cloud VMware Engine lets them easily migrate and transform VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without changes to apps, tools, or processes. If you’re running VMware environments on premises, imagine how Google Cloud VMware Engine could help you accelerate your digital transformation. Fasten your seatbelts.

To learn more, get a free migration cost estimate, and try Google Cloud VMware Engine for free, visit cloud.google.com/vmware-engine.

How to use NetApp CVS as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers a fully managed enterprise-grade 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 change to on-premises 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.

For environments that are storage heavy, Google Cloud VMware Engine offers several ways by which you can expand storage available to your VMs - these include offering in-guest access to storage options such as Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud Filestore, Dell PowerScale, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (NetApp CVS).

Our expanding partnership with NetApp is focused on making cloud migration easier. One aspect of this expanded partnership is enabling the use of NetApp Cloud Volume Service NFS shares as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. We’re excited to share that the solution is now generally available, enabling customers to use NetApp CVS volumes as datastores for VMware Engine.

Use of external NFS datastores can lower TCO for customers running storage heavy workloads in VMware Engine by enabling independent scaling of compute and storage. NetApp CVS provides fully managed NFS volumes with scalable performance in the cloud.

To use this solution, users first need to peer their CVS tenant project with their Google Cloud VMware Engine tenant project and enable ESXi hosts to communicate with the NetApp CVS. Subsequently, users create CVS volumes, and manage those volumes using CVS UI/API/CLI. Before a CVS volume can be mounted as an external NFS datastore to ESXi hosts in VMware Engine, users must block volumes from accidental deletion to avoid disruption to the vSphere environment. This can be achieved by setting a flag (“Block volume from deletion when clients are connected”) at volume creation time. After creating volumes that can be used with VMware Engine, users can subsequently leverage these volumes as CVS NFS datastores for VMware Engine clusters.

“Since our partnership with Google Cloud began in 2018, we have continued to innovate jointly with Google to deliver the best hybrid cloud experience to our customers,” said Eric Han, Vice President, Product Management, Cloud at NetApp. “NetApp Cloud Volume datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine enables organizations to scale compute and storage independently, uniquely enabling them to rapidly lift and transform their storage-heavy VMware estates in Google Cloud.”

“We’re excited to offer customers a compelling path to move enterprise workloads to the cloud,” said Manoj Sharma, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud. “Customers often have a need for large amounts of storage, and NetApp Cloud Volumes Service datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine is an easy and cost-effective way to meet this need. With NetApp and Google Cloud VMware Engine, customers can extend their existing investments in VMware—using existing tools and processes—while enhancing agility, security and availability.”

If you or your customer wants to take advantage of this capability, please reach out to your Google, NetApp or VMware account team. Learn more about this capability by visiting the NetApp blog.

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

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 16:00:00 +0000

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.

Load balancing Google Cloud VMware Engine with Traffic Director

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 16:00:00 +0000

The following solution brief discusses a GCVE + Traffic Director implementation aimed at providing customers an easy way to scale out web services, while enabling application migrations to Google Cloud. The solution is built on top of a flexible and open architecture that exemplifies the unique capabilities of Google Cloud Platform. Let’s elaborate:

Easy: The full configuration takes minutes to implement and can be scripted or defined with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for rapid consumption and minimal errors.

Flexible and open: The solution relies on Envoy, an open source platform that enjoys tremendous popularity with the network and application communities.

The availability of Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) has given GCP customers the ability to deploy Cloud applications on a certified VMware stack that is managed, supported and maintained by Google. Many of these customers also demand seamless integration between their applications running on GCVE, and the various infrastructure services that are provided natively by our platform such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or serverless frameworks like Cloud Functions, App Engine or Cloud Run. Networking services are at the top of that list.

In this blog, we discuss how 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 also serves as the glue that links the native GCP load balancers and the GCVE backends, with the objective of enabling these technical benefits:

Certificate Authority integration, for full lifecycle management of SSL certificates.
DDoS protection with Cloud Armor, helps protect your applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks.
Cloud CDN, for cached content delivery.
Intelligent anycast with a Single IP and Global Reach, for improved failover, resiliency and availability.
Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP), to provision and use your own public IP addresses for Google Cloud resources.
Diverse backend types integration in addition to GCVE, such as GCE, GKE, Cloud Storage and serverless.

Scenario #1 - External load balancer

The following diagram provides a summary of the GCP components involved in this architecture:

This scenario shows an external HTTP(S) load balancer used to forward traffic to the Traffic Director dataplane component, implemented as a fleet of Envoy proxies. Users can create routable NSX segments and centralize the definition of all traffic policies in Traffic Director. The GCVE VM IP and port pairs are specified directly in the hybrid NEG, meaning all network operations are fully managed by a Google Cloud control plane.

Alternatively, GCVE VMs can be deployed to a non-routable NSX segment behind an NSX L4 load balancer configured at the Tier-1 level, and the Load Balancer VIP can be exported to the customer VPC via the import and export of routes in the VPC Peering connection. It is important to note that in GCVE, it is highly recommended that NSX-T load balancers be associated with Tier-1 gateways, and not the Tier-0 gateway.

The steps to configure load balancers in NSX-T, including server pools, health checks, virtual servers and distribution algorithms are documented by VMware and not covered in this document.

Fronting the web applications with an NSX load balancer would allow for the following:

Only VIP routes are announced, allowing the use of private IP addresses in the web tier, as well as overlapping IP addresses in case of multi-tenant deployments.
Internal clients (applications inside of GCP or GCVE) can point to the VIP of the NSX Load Balancer, while external clients can point to the public VIP in front of a native, GCP external load balancer.

A L7 NSX load balancer can also be used (not discussed in this example), for advanced application-layer services, such as cookie session persistence, URL mapping, and more.

To recap, the implementation discussed in this scenario shows an external HTTP(S) load balancer, but please note that an external TCP/UDP network load balancer or TCP Proxy could also be used for supporting protocols other than HTTP(S). There are certain restrictions when using Traffic Director in L4 mode, such as a single backend service per target proxy, which need to be accounted for when implementing your architecture.

Scenario #2 - Internal load balancer

In this scenario, the only change is the load balancing platform used to route requests to Traffic Director-managed Envoy proxies. This use case may be appropriate in certain situations, for instance, whenever the users want to take advantage of advanced traffic management capabilities not supported without Traffic Director, as documented here.

The Envoy-managed proxies controlled by Traffic Director can send traffic directly to GCVE workloads:

Alternately, and similar to what was discussed in Scenario #1, an NSX LB VIP can be used instead of the explicit GCVE VM IPs, which introduces an extra load balancing layer:

To recap, this scenario shows a possible configuration with L7 Internal Load Balancer, but an L4 Internal Load Balancer can also be used for supporting protocols other than HTTP(S). Please note there are certain considerations when leveraging L4 vs. L7 load balancers in combination with Traffic Director, which are all documented here.

Conclusion

With the combination of multiple GCP products, customers can take advantage of the various distributed network services offered by Google, such as global load balancing, while hosting their applications on a Google Cloud VMware Engine environment that provides continuity for their operations, without sacrificing availability, reliability or performance.

Go ahead and review the GCVE networking whitepaper today. For additional information about VMware Engine, please visit the VMware Engine landing page, and explore our interactive tutorials. And be on the lookout for future articles, where we will discuss how VMware Engine integrates with other core GCP infrastructure and data services.

Understanding Google Cloud’s VMware Engine Migration Process and Performance

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) allows a user to deploy a managed VMware environment within an Enterprise Cloud Solution. We’ve put together a new white paper, “Google Cloud VMware Engine Performance Migration & Benchmarks,” to help our customers better understand the architecture, its performance, and the benefits. If you’re not familiar with Google Cloud VMware Engine yet, let’s talk a bit more about it.

Utilizing Google Cloud lets you access existing services and cloud capabilities; one of those services and solutions mentioned within this document is our Hybrid Cloud Extension, also known as HCX. HCX provides you with an easier transition from on-prem to the cloud, allowing systems administrators to quickly deploy a private cloud and scale their needed Virtual Machines accordingly. The proposed referenced solution is well suited for organizations looking to begin their cloud migration journey and understand the technical requirements within the process without having to be fully committed to their cloud strategy or evacuation data center strategy.

Currently, many organizations are navigating their way through their current IT challenges and cloud solutions. Google Cloud VMware Engine provides you the “easy on-ramp” to migrate your workloads into the cloud. You don’t have to move everything to the cloud at once, though, because GCVE provides the option to scale your IT infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud at your discretion by leveraging HCX.

HCX also lets you migrate a virtual machine from on-premise to the cloud via a VPN or internet connection without any additional downtime or having to save their work and log off of their machine. With GCVE, you can continue to work during your business hours and operations while your systems administrators migrate your teams to the cloud without the downtime associated with virtual machine migration.

The ability to migrate a virtual machine from on-prem to the cloud raises another question: how fast can a targeted virtual machine migrate to the cloud? Google analyzed this specific scenario, assessing what the requirements were to migrate an on-prem virtual machine to the cloud via a Virtual Private Network (VPN), and then analyzing how fast that connection was established and transmitted through HCX.

The answer to that question—and more—is all contained within our brand new white paper, “Google Cloud VMware Engine Performance Migration & Benchmarks,“ which you can download now. And if you’re ready to get started with your migration efforts, sign up for a free discovery and assessment with our migration experts.

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

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 16:00:00 +0000

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.

Optimize the cost of your Google Cloud VMware Engine deployments

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Google Cloud VMware Engine allows you to deploy a managed VMware environment with dedicated hardware in minutes with the flexibility to add and remove ESXi nodes on-demand. This flexibility is particularly convenient to quickly add compute capacity as needed. However, it is important to implement cost optimization strategies and review processes such that increased cost does not come as a surprise. Since hardware needs to be added to ESXi clusters to accomodate for increased workload capacity, additional care needs to be taken when scaling out the Private Clouds.

In this blog, we explore best practices for operating Google Cloud VMware Engine Private Clouds with a focus on optimizing overall cost.

Google Cloud VMware Engine Billing Principles

Customers are billed hourly by the number of VMware ESXi nodes that have been deployed. Similar to the commitment-based pricing model that Compute Engine offers for Virtual Machine instances, Google Cloud VMware Engine offers committed use discounts for one and three-year terms. For detailed pricing information refer to the pricing section on the Google Cloud VMware Engine Product Overview page.

Cost Optimization Strategy #1: Apply Committed Use Discounts

Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) are discounts based on a commitment to running a number of Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes in a particular region for either a one- or three-year term. CUDs for a three-year commitment can provide up to a 50% discount if their cost is invoiced in full at the start of the contract. As you might expect, commitment-based discounts cannot be canceled once purchased so you need confidence in how many nodes you will run in your Private Cloud. Apply this discount for the minimal amount of nodes you will run over a one- or three-year period and revise the number of needed nodes regularly if Google Cloud VMware Engine is the target platform of your data center migration.

Cost Optimization Strategy #2: Optimize your Storage Consumption

If your workloads consume a lot of storage (e.g. backup systems, file servers or large databases), you may need to scale out the cluster to add additional vSAN storage capacity. Consider the following optimization strategies to keep storage consumption low:

1. Apply custom storage policies which use RAID 5 or RAID 6 rather than RAID 1 (default storage policy) while achieving the same Failures to Tolerance (FTT). The FTT number is a key metric as it is directly linked to the monthly uptime SLA of the ESXi cluster. A storage policy using RAID 1 with FTT=1 incurs a 100% storage overhead since a RAID 1 encoding scheme mirrors blocks of data for redundancy. Similarly, if FTT=2 is required (e.g. for more critical workloads that require a 99.99% uptime availability) RAID 1 produces a 200% storage overhead. A RAID 5 configuration is more storage efficient, as a storage policy with FTT=1 can be achieved with only a 33% storage overhead. Likewise, RAID 6 can provide FTT=2 with only 50% storage overhead which means 50% of storage consumption can be saved compared to using the default storage policy with RAID 1. Note, however, that there is a tradeoff: RAID 1 requires fewer I/O operations to the storage devices and may provide better performance.

2. Create new disks using the “Thin Provisioning” format. Thin provisioned disks save storage space as they start small and expand as more data is written to the disk.

3. Avoid Backups filling up vSAN storage. Backup tools such as Actifio provide integrations of VMware environments and Cloud Storage allowing operators to move backups to a cheaper storage location. Backup data which needs to be retained long-term should be stored inside Cloud Storage buckets with life-cycle policies to move data to a cheaper storage class after a certain time period.

4. Enable deduplication and compression on the vSAN cluster to reduce the amount of redundant data blocks and hence the overall storage consumption.

Cost Optimization Strategy #3: Rightsize ESXi Clusters

1. Size ESXi clusters such that CPU, Memory and storage utilization are at a high level but support the outage of an ESXi node without any failure of workloads. Operating a cluster with resource utilization close to full capacity might cause an outage in case of a sudden hardware failure. Having the highest resource utilization metric (CPU, Memory or Storage) at approximately 70% allows a safe operation of the cluster while also using the capabilities of the cluster.

2. Start new Private Cloud deployments with single-node clusters and expand them when needed. Google Cloud VMware Engine has recently added the ability to create private clouds that contain a single node for testing and proofs of concept. Single node clusters can only be kept for a maximum of 60 days and do not have any SLA. However, they provide a great method to minimize cost during the integration with day-2 tooling, configurations and testing. Once the Private Cloud landing zone is fully configured, the one-node cluster can be extended to a three-node cluster to be eligible for an SLA.

3. Consolidate ESXi clusters if possible: If you are running workloads on multiple clusters, review if clusters can be consolidated for a more efficient balancing of resources across clusters. As an example, if workloads are divided by OS type or by production and non-production, a higher resource utilization may be achieved if clusters are consolidated. However, there should be care taken in reviewing whether there are other constraints which would prevent consolidation, such as licensing requirements. If VMs need to run on specific nodes for licensing requirements, consider DRS Affinity rules to pin workloads to specific nodes.

4. Consolidate Private Clouds if possible: Review if Private Clouds can be consolidated if you run more than one. Each Private Cloud requires its own set of management VMs which causes an overhead to the overall resource consumption.

Cost Optimization Strategy #4: Review Resource Utilization of Workloads

1. Review the resource utilization of VMs on an on-going basis after running applications in a steady state. Extract vCenter metrics programmatically or visually to provide right-sizing recommendations. For instance, if it is noticed that VMs consume more CPU and memory resources than needed, tune the VM parameters during a scheduled downtime of the application (requires reboot).

Consider scheduling the execution of a script which extracts CPU and memory utilization statistics from vCenter and stores the data in a convenient format such as in a CSV file. As an example, this can be implemented using PowerShell from a script execution host.

Define criteria to characterize workloads as over- or underutilized resources by comparing their average CPU and memory utilization over a minimum of 30 days with a reasonable threshold value.

Example conditions (thresholds can be tuned to meet your requirements):

CPU Usage (30-day and 1-year average) % is less than (<) 50%, and
CPU Usage (30-day and 1-year maximum) % is less than (<) 80%

Despite the above recommendations, avoid making abrupt changes and always carefully review the data against the requirements of the workloads.

2. Use Cloud Monitoring with the Standalone agent integration to review cluster and workloads metrics. Follow the installation guide to enable metrics forwarding to integrate vCenter metrics with Cloud Monitoring.

3. Consider using third-party tooling, such as VMware vROps, to get insights into the capacity and utilization to help with right-sizing if the workload is CPU/memory bound (blog post for more details). Note that vROps requires additional license and needs to be installed on a per VM/host.

Managing Cost Optimization - People and Process

The efficacy of cost optimization hinges also on the people and processes readiness to support and run the operations.

1. Set up a cost optimization function - In any cloud operating model, cost management and optimization is not a responsibility of a single team but requires a coordinated effort from multiple teams/roles. Sponsorship and support from executive leadership is needed to make optimization a shared top priority and build a central cost optimization function within your Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE), Finance (for defining optimization goals and monitoring spend), Architecture (for reviewing optimization options) and Operations/SRE (for implementing the options). Additionally, engage business/application stakeholders for validating availability and performance impact on workloads.

2. Adopt a crawl-walk-run approach - Cost optimization is a continuous and ongoing operation and follows an enterprise’s cloud adoption maturity curve. Define supporting processes and tools as you start and refine them as you scale.

3. Prioritize the optimization options - While optimization can bring in significant cost savings, it comes at a cost of resource effort and time. Prioritize your options based on the potential savings vs estimated level of effort to identify the most impactful ways to reduce spend and realize quick wins.

4. Report and measure - Identify key metrics of interest (e.g. cost per user / tenant-customer) and define KPIs to continuously measure optimization outcomes and success against them.

Refer to our Cloud FinOps whitepaper for a holistic framework on driving financial accountability and business value realization. Also check the principles of cloud cost optimization blog for additional guidance on tools and cost optimization best practices.

Call to Action

In this blog we have listed several strategies to reduce the overall cost of Private Clouds which differ in their implementation effort. Quick wins that can be implemented to reduce cost in the short-term include the use of CUDs, specifically if VMware Engine will be used as a platform for workloads for at least one year, as well as custom storage policies to optimize overall vSAN storage consumption.

Optimization strategies which include the adoption of processes to monitor utilization metrics of clusters and VMs provide helpful insights on whether workloads are oversized. Yet, adjustments to workload sizing should not be made swiftly and require careful review of metrics in a steady state. This cost optimization does rather take effect in a longer term.

At Google Cloud, we have developed an architecture framework to help you optimize your spend and adopt Google Cloud VMware Engine while maximizing your returns on your journey to cloud. If you are interested in more information, please contact your Google Cloud account team.

A special thanks to Wayne Chu for his contributions and help with the implementation of cost optimization processes with our enterprise customers.

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: Single nodes, certifications and more

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 17:00:00 +0000

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.

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade VMware stack running natively in Google Cloud. This fully managed cloud service is one of the fastest paths to the cloud for VMware workloads without making changes to existing applications or operating models across 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.

The service helps our customers save money and time while accelerating their digital transformation journey. In fact, in a study conducted by VMware’s Cloud Economics team, Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an average of 45% lower TCO compared to on-premises.¹Further, LIQ, a CRM software company was able to achieve 60% total infrastructure cost reduction compared with two years ago, and a 92% savings rate for storing historical data.

In June of 2021 we announced Autoscale, Mumbai expansion and more.

Key updates this time around include:

Single node private cloud: a time-bound, 60-day, single node non-production environment for VMware Engine that allows you to do proofs-of-concept.
New private clouds will now deploy on vSphere version 7.0 Update 2 and NSX-T version 3.1.2.
Preview of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service enabling independent scaling of datastore storage from compute without adding additional hosts
Service availability in Toronto and expansion into a second zone in Frankfurt and Sydney
Compliance certifications updates: achievement of ISO 27001/27017/27018, SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3 and PCI-DSS compliance certifications
We are also working on the ability to purchase Prepay options via the Google Cloud Console for 1 year and 3 year commitment terms

Let us look into each of these updates in more depth.

Single node private cloud: We understand that your Cloud Transformation decisions do not happen overnight. Often you want to understand the values and benefits of your option by using products through trials and technical validations. To support such scenarios, you can now get started with your Google Cloud VMware Engine experience with a 60-day time-bound single node private cloud. Designed for non-production usage such as pilots and proof-of-concept evaluations, this configuration allows you to understand the capabilities of this service. It has a 60-day time span - this means that after 60 days, the single node private cloud is automatically deleted along with the workloads and data in it. At any point during these 60 days, you can expand to a production 3 node private cloud with a single click.

Note: A private cloud must contain at least 3 nodes to be eligible for coverage based on the SLA.

Upgrades to the core VMware stack: All new VMware Engine private clouds now deploy with VMware vSphere version 7.0 Update 2 and NSX-T version 3.1.2. For existing customers, Google Cloud VMware Engine automatically handles the upgrades of the VMware stack from version 7.0 Update 1 to 7.0 Update 2 and the NSX-T stack from version 3.0 to 3.1.2 with customers receiving proactive notifications and having the ability to select their upgrade window. Read more in our November 2021 service announcement.

ESXi: Enhanced administrative capabilities, reduced compute and I/O latency, and jitter for latency sensitive workloads, and more
vCenter: Scaled VMware vSphere vMotion operations, security fixes and more.
NSX-T: New events and alarms, support for parallel cluster upgrade, migration from NVDS to VDS and more

Preview of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service as datastores: This capability will enable you to independently scale your datastore storage without adding additional hosts, thereby saving costs. In October 2021, NetApp announced the integration of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. It will enable you to migrate your vSphere workloads that require large amounts of vmdk storage to the cloud and address the needs of storage-bound workloads and use-cases such as DR. This complements the ability for you to use NetApp CVS as external storage that is mounted from within the guest OS of your Google Cloud VMware Engine VMs.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Toronto region. This brings the availability of the service to 13 regions globally, enabling our multi-national and regional customers to leverage a VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service platform on Google Cloud.

Expansion into a second zone in Frankfurt and Sydney: While we provide 4-9’s of SLA in a single zone in each one of the 13 regions that the service is available in, there are customers who want even more availability. We are happy to announce that Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in second zones in Frankfurt and Sydney. In addition, we are working on making Google Cloud VMware Engine available in additional zones.

Compliance certifications updates:

We enable customers to meet their security and compliance needs for their VMware workloads - with a single operator model. Google manages the Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure and the administrative tasks that go with managing the systems, platforms, and VMware stack that supports it. These components run on Google Cloud, which leverages the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to protect your information, identities, applications, and devices.

One of the areas that we have been working on is adding more compliance certifications to Google Cloud VMware Engine. As you may remember, Google Cloud VMware Engine is covered under the Google Cloud Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Let us take a look at new certifications we have achieved in the last few months. The below certifications are available for Google Cloud VMware Engine running in Ashburn, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Netherlands, Singapore, São Paulo, Montreal, Council Bluffs, Mumbai. The supported locations are listed in the corresponding audit reports. Your Google contact should be able to provide you with those reports.

ISO Compliance: As of November 4 2021, Google Cloud VMware Engine is certified as ISO/IEC 27001/27017/27018 compliant. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent, non-governmental international organization with an international membership of 163 national standards bodies. The ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards enable organizations to keep their information assets more secure.

SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 Compliance: Google Cloud VMware Engine has received the SOC 2 Type 2 as well as the SOC 3 report based on third-party audit.

The SOC 2 is a report based on the Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' (AICPA) existing Trust Services Criteria (TSC). The purpose of this report is to evaluate an organization’s information systems relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Like SOC 2, the SOC 3 report has been developed based on the Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Trust Service Criteria (TSC). The SOC 3 is a public report of internal controls over security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality.
Please contact your Google account team if you would like a copy of the report.

PCI DSS Compliance: Google Cloud VMware Engine has been reviewed by an independent Qualified Security Assessor and determined to be PCI DSS 3.2.1 compliant. This means that the service provides an infrastructure upon which customers may build their own services or applications which store, process, or transmit cardholder data. It is important to note that customers are still responsible for ensuring that their applications are PCI DSS compliant. PCI DSS is a set of network security and business best practices guidelines adopted by the PCI Security Standards Council to establish a “minimum security standard” to protect customers’ payment card information. Google Cloud undergoes at least an annual third-party audit to certify individual products against the PCI DSS.

Please contact your Google account team if you would like a copy of the reports.

Prepay via Google Cloud Console: As you are aware, you have monthly as well as prepay options for 1 year and 3 year commitment contracts for purchasing Google Cloud VMware Engine. Monthly payment options are executable via the Google Cloud console, but prepay options require offline order processing. Prepay options are attractive due to the high discount levels they create (up to 50% discounts are possible). We are working on enabling prepay purchasing option directly via your Google Cloud console. If you are interested in this capability, please contact your Google Sales representative.

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

The authors would like to thank Krishna Chengavalli and Manish Lohani for their contributions to this article.

_{1. https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud/2021/07/28/google-cloud-vmware-engine-saves-over-45-on-tco-in-first-study/}

Using BigQuery with data sources in Google Cloud VMware Engine

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:00:00 +0000

This blog is intended for customers who have migrated on-premises data sources to Google Cloud VMware Engine and want to utilize data and analytics services provided by Google Cloud. One of the objectives of customers who choose Google Cloud is to leverage Google Cloud analytics with their datasets. If you are an IT decision maker or a data architect who wants to quickly use the power of your data with Google analytics, this blog describes approaches to access your data within BigQuery, where advanced analytics and machine learning on your datasets is possible.

Why?

Data consumption and analytics is at the forefront of technology. Customers today consume and manage large amounts of data and resource pools. These challenges create an opportunity for Google Cloud to assist in managing and understanding your existing databases without having the need to undergo costly re-architecting of your source material or data location. This blog presents approaches to access Google Cloud data and analytics services with your existing data without having to re-architect your databases. Once your data sources are in Google Cloud VMware Engine, Google’s highly available and fault tolerant infrastructure can be leveraged to enhance the performance of data pipelines. These solutions aim to reduce time to value extraction from your datasets with cloud native analytics available via BigQuery.

This solution of migrating via Google Cloud VMware Engine offers advantages to all parts of data operations. The database administrator (DBA) and virtual infrastructure/cloud admins can use familiar environments similar to on-premises on the cloud. The on-premises infrastructure team can enable the data scientist/AI/machine learning (ML) teams using familiar toolsets. These teams now have access to Google Cloud AI/ML/data analytics capabilities for their on-premises data.

For example, if you want to uncover cross-sell opportunities within your products, the first step is to ensure that product usage and billing datasets across your products are connected for analytics. The DBA team will identify these datasets and the infrastructure team will enable access to these sources. The application team will then replicate this data to BigQuery and use approaches such as BigQuery ML recommendations to uncover cross-sell opportunities. Another example of a use case is forecasting usage growth for operations and growth planning. Once your sales data is replicated within BigQuery, approaches for advanced time-series forecasting become available with your datasets.

What does this cover?

We present approaches to replicate your relational datasets within BigQuery in a private and secure way utilizing either Google Cloud Data Fusion or Google Cloud Datastream. Datafusion is an ETL tool that supports various kinds of data pipelines. Datastream is a service for change-data-capture and replication. Using both these services, data is always within your projects in Google Cloud and internal IP is used to access data. We will focus on real-time replication, so that you can access your data continuously from operational data stores, such as SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle within BigQuery.

Moving data from your data sources to the cloud and maintaining data pipelines to your data warehouses via Extract Transform Load (ETL) is a time consuming activity. An alternate approach is ELT (Extract Load Transform). The ELT approach loads data into the target system (e.g., BigQuery) before transforming the data. The ELT process is frequently preferred over the traditional ETL process because it’s simpler to realize and loads the data faster.

With your datasets now residing in the Google Cloud, data teams can utilize Cloud Data Fusion and Datastream over the high speed, low latency Google Cloud network to replicate or move data from your VMware infrastructure to various destinations in Google Cloud such as Google Cloud native storage buckets or BigQuery.

For simplicity, we will assume that all services are consumed within the same project. We will also discuss some pricing implications when moving data from Google Cloud VMware Engine from on-premises or another virtual private cloud (VPC).

Cloud Data Fusion:

Cloud Data Fusion provides a visual point-and-click interface that enables code-free deployment of ETL/ELT data pipeline. Cloud Data Fusion also provides a replication accelerator that allows you to replicate your tables into BigQuery.

Cloud Data Fusion internally sets up a tenant project with its own VPCs to manage Cloud Data Fusion resources. To access data sources within Google Cloud VMware Engine using Cloud Data Fusion, we use a reverse proxy on the main VPC. This is described in the image below.

In this scenario, we have our data workloads running on the Google Cloud VMware Engine instance within the project. The Google Cloud VMware Engine environment is accessed via a project level VPC peered with Google Cloud VMware Engine. A Google Compute Engine instance on the project level VPC exposes reverse proxy to the Google Cloud VMware Engine database to services that are unable to access the Google Cloud VMware Engine instance directly. A Cloud Data Fusion instance is enabled with private IP access and network peering to the main VPC and is able to access the data via the reverse proxy instance. This process to set up internal IP access and network peering on Cloud Data Fusion is described in this documentation.

Once this peering is complete, we use a Java Database Connectivity connector within Cloud Data Fusion to access our databases either for replication or for advanced ETL operations. To enable change data capture, we need to enable the database within Google Cloud VMware Engine to track and capture the changes to the databases. This entire process setup and replication are described in the documentation for MySQL and for SQL Server.

Google Cloud Datastream:

Datastream is a serverless change data capture and replication service. You can access streaming, low-latency data from Oracle, and MySQL databases on Google Cloud VMware Engine. This approach offers more flexibility in managing data flow pipelines. This solution is currently in pre-general availability and is only available in select regions.

This option also requires a reverse proxy configured within a Google Compute Engine instance. This reverse proxy is used to access data sources within Google Cloud VMware Engine. This option is described in this documentation.

The complete setup to use Datastream can be found in this how-to guide. To enable replication, we need a stream configured on Datastream, this stream accesses data from the database and pipes the data to the cloud storage sink. Datastream accesses data using a reverse proxy which needs to be exposed on the customer’s VPC. To pipe the data to BigQuery, we use a pre-configured Datastream to BigQuery template within Dataflow.

How to get started?

First step is to migrate workloads to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Your cloud admin/architect will typically drive this. If not already identified during the migration phase, the next step is to identify databases residing on virtual machines hosted within Google Cloud VMware Engine, and recreate existing reports using BigQuery. In most organizations there will be multiple personas involved with this process. For example, a data architect might be the best source for info on data sources, a solutions architect will have insights on the cost/performance implications, and the infrastructure inputs will be needed for network interfaces. The steps below outline one possible approach to enable this motion.

Identify datasets residing on virtual machines migrated to Google Cloud VMware Engine that are used for reports.
Select the right pipeline (Datastream vs. Data Fusion) based on the database type and the pipeline requirements (price/performance trade offs and ease of use).
Based on the data pipeline, select the appropriate region. There are no data egress charges within the same region.
Setup the reverse proxy to the Google Cloud VMware Engine dataset.
Setup the replication service with performance parameters based on the replication performance needed.
Enable analytics and visualization based on the business requirements on the dataset.

Conclusion:

The Google Cloud VMware Engine service is a fast and easy way to enable data and analytics visualization using your existing data sets. You can now leverage your existing infrastructure operational posture on VMware to enable cloud analytics without having to undergo time consuming re-architecting of your databases. These approaches enable you to leverage the performance benefits of dedicated hardware on Google Cloud, connecting with the world's most advanced data capabilities.

Acknowledgements:

The authors would like to thank Manoj Sharma and Sai Gopalan regarding their inputs on this blog.

VMware and Google Cloud: The next chapter

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 16:30:00 +0000

Google Cloud Next and VMworld 2021 are less than two weeks away, and the partnership between Google Cloud and VMware is entering a new chapter. Over the past year, our close partnership with VMware and mutual dedication to customer success has inspired us to deliver several innovative capabilities, including expanding the service to 12 regions worldwide along with our industry-leading 99.99% availability, multi-region networking, and improved scalability to make it easy for customers to rapidly migrate to the cloud.

"Our collaboration with Google is noteworthy because of the value it brings to our joint customers. The mutual success we have had partnering with Google on solutions that enable VMware workloads to run natively in the cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine and digital workspace with Android and Chrome Enterprise is a testament to the quality of our joint offerings,” said Gregory Lehrer, VP Strategic Technology Partnerships, VMware. “As a result of our ongoing collaboration, we continue to see customers adopting our joint solution, indicating a strong and effective partnership. Our joint roadmap for the future points to an upward trajectory as we scale to meet anticipated demand.

Across industries, customers are increasingly looking to accelerate their digital transformation due to the need for app modernization, aging infrastructure on-premises, and the need to meet customer needs in an always-on, digital environment. Customers such as Carrefour, a global retailer across 30 countries, quickly moved their on-premises environment to Google Cloud VMware Engine, while reducing operating costs by 40% and energy consumption by 45%. Furthermore, they were able to simultaneously improve the experience for shoppers and employees, and bolstered sales and shopper engagement with personalized offers.

Companies are also looking to migrate and modernize their business with Google Cloud VMware Engine. LIQ, a CRM software company, migrated 80% of business applications and 50% of databases in just three months, and now plan to modernize their applications with microservices to lower maintenance time and costs. Looking forward, we’re focused on helping customers derive greater ROI from their investments in three ways:

Flexibility - Single node Private Cloud SDDC to enable trials or proof-of-concept validations at a much lower cost.
Availability - New geographic zones and expanded capacity within zones to better serve local business needs and continue to maintain data sovereignty within local regions.
Ecosystem integrations - Building on our leading open platform, we’ve developed even more integrations with solutions across the ecosystem. VMware has validated it’s Disaster Recovery tool (Site Recovery Manager), Virtualization management tool (vRealize Cloud Management), as well as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure tool (Horizon Desktop) to ensure you can bring your mission critical applications to the cloud without disruption.

We continue to focus on making migrations simpler as well. The recently announced Catalyst Program now provides even greater financial flexibility as eligible customers can get one-time Google Cloud credits to help offset existing VMware license investments. The program is consumption-based and designed to provide even more value as you accelerate your migration to the cloud. Furthermore, programs such as our Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP) provide free assessment and planning tools to reduce complexity, enable choice, and increase flexibility throughout the migration process.

There’s much more to come from VMware and Google Cloud. We’re proud to be a Platinum Sponsor at VMworld 2021 and invite you to join us to learn more about our commitment to enabling digital transformation. Be sure to catch the fireside chat with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram as they discuss industry trends and customer success. You’ll also hear more from our joint-customers and our product leaders about what’s to come. We can’t wait to connect with you virtually at the event.

Making VMware migrations to Google Cloud simpler than ever

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Just over a year ago we launched Google Cloud VMware Engine to help enterprises easily migrate their VMware workloads to Google Cloud. Since then, we helped retailers, financial institutions, telcos, and other global customers move to Google Cloud to lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and modernize their applications with Google Cloud services. To help more VMware users ease their transition to the cloud, we’re excited today to announce the Catalyst Program.

Moving to the cloud can bring up concerns about how to rationalize existing license investments you have made. The Google Cloud Catalyst Program provides Google Cloud VMware Engine users financial flexibility and choice to accelerate your journey to Google Cloud.

Google Cloud Catalyst Program benefits include:

Financial flexibility: Eligible customers can now get one-time Google Cloud credits to help offset existing VMware license investments. This offer may be combined with other Google Cloud offers to reduce your overall cloud TCO. For example, credits may be applied to PayGo, monthly (1 or 3 year) commitment, or prepay commitment SKUs consumed during the first 12 months of the program.
Choice: You are free to apply earned credits across any Google Cloud service, including Google Cloud VMware Engine. In addition, this program is available directly through Google Cloud or through existing Google Cloud channel partners you work with.
Consumption-based: Moving to the cloud often expands the reach of enterprises resulting in the need for increased cloud resources. We’ve designed this program to grow with your business. As you shift more of your business to the cloud, you earn additional credits which can be applied toward any future Google Cloud spend.

You now have a plethora of incentives to help you execute on your journey to Google Cloud. Our Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP) program provides free assessment and planning tools to help you understand your inventory and develop a migration game plan. You can also take advantage of our on-demand or committed use discounts for one- and three-year terms with monthly and prepay upfront payment plans. And, now you can take advantage of the Catalyst Program to help offset existing VMware licensing investments, which can be combined with other Google offers.

Google Cloud customers and partners share some of the benefits of participating in the Catalyst Program:

“The Google Cloud VMware Engine Catalyst Program will help us rationalize our existing license investments flexibly and reduce the cost of migration. The potential savings in OPEX makes good sense since we were going to migrate anyway and this program will help us move our business to the cloud more rapidly.”—Jason Elliott, Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Southwire.

“We see first-hand that migrating to the cloud can be a complex and costly process. The Catalyst Program represents a unique way for customers to offset some of the migration costs, while Google Cloud VMware Engine removes much of the cloud migration complexity.”—Gregory Lehrer, Vice President Strategic Technology Partnerships, VMware

“By combining Google Cloud technologies with services and offerings from SADA, customers will benefit from greater innovation, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation along their cloud journey. The Catalyst Program is a simple and powerful way to reduce the cost of migrating to the cloud and help accelerate an enterprise’s digital transformation.”—Miles Ward, CTO, SADA

To learn more about the Google Cloud VMware Engine Catalyst Program, please download this program overview. To apply for the program, please contact us.

Monitoring made simple for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud operations suite

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Moving workloads to Cloud has many benefits to organizations: automated upgrades and patches, added security, a cost-saving subscription-based model, on-demand capacity and more. If your organization has moved to the Cloud or is seriously considering it, you are probably wondering what to use for monitoring your infrastructure, application, network, workloads and more. Google Cloud VMware Engine customers now have an opportunity to monitor their VMware infrastructure using Google Cloud Operations Agent in Preview. Better still, for many customers, Cloud Operations Suite is free with their Google Cloud VMware Engine subscription, so long as their usage is under the free tier usage thresholds.

Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring brings infrastructure data in a single portal

To make monitoring simpler, more secure, and more cost-effective, we’ve expanded the Google Cloud operations suite to include Google Cloud VMware Engine. Our newest Preview Cloud Operations agent for Google Cloud VMware Engine does not require an integration with a third-party solution while allowing you to collect vCenter and vSAN metrics and vCenter syslog. You can also use the same agent to bring infrastructure metrics and logs from your on-premise deployment to Cloud Operations.

The new agent lets you monitor infrastructure in one centralized tool with all the features of Google Cloud operations, like pre-built and customizable dashboards and integration with your existing alerting system so you can build alerts based on your own thresholds and logic.

Here is how it works:

Google Cloud VMWare Engine logs and metrics collection architecture

Google Cloud VMware Engine integration with the Operations Suite using a Preview Cloud Operations agent. Current solution transfers all the data through Google infrastructure, without requiring the customer to integrate and share credentials with a third party solution.

You have the ability to configure almost anything you need. For example, you can configure an alert via an SMS message on your phone to let you know as soon as a new VM is rolled up in your instance, so it’s truly in your hands immediately. For more complex needs, you can apply algorithms or build models to get deeper insights.

Transitioning to Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring is simple

Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring is easy to implement and use because you don’t need to develop anything, create tools, or worry about integrating metrics with dashboarding or alerting solution. Just as you normally would, when you roll out a VMware Engine private cloud, you can take the following steps to collect both syslog, vCenter and vSAN metrics.

Create a Linux OS VM instance on your private cloud, this VM will host your agent
Run a single line of code to install an agent
Configure the agent
Configure log forwarding
Create a service account with logging and monitoring privileges through Infrastructure as Code or Cloud Console.
Optional: you can also install free out-of-the-box Google Cloud VMware Engine dashboards from Git repository.

Detailed instructions are available here.

Simplicity beyond setup

Once you set up monitoring, you’ll notice that it never asks you what metrics you want to collect. You can, however, select which metrics not to collect (by default vCenter and vSAN metrics are collected). The tool identifies the servers, the metadata, and information such as the names of VM instances. It collects the metrics and logs at regular intervals. The metrics start flowing as soon as you sign into your Google Cloud operations account.

Once the data starts flowing, you can also use three premade Google Cloud VMware Engine dashboards (Overview, Contentions, and VM Performance) to speed up your monitoring efforts.

The Google Cloud VMware Engine Overview dashboard gives you a 30-mile view of your deployment, including high-level counts of your data centers, private clouds, ESXi nodes, red VM instances, total VM instances and more. You can easily swap, add, or remove metrics in the dashboard. As you scroll down, the dashboard gives you a more granular view of your deployment, first zooming into your ESXi hosts and then VM instances.

Google Cloud monitoring’s intuitive dashboard editor

Google Cloud VMware Engine Contentions dashboard allows you to see which resources—CPU, memory, or storage—are at risk of being exhausted along with which assets—ESXi hosts, VM instances—are consuming most of your resources.

Visibility across your VMs in real time

Google Cloud VMware Engine Virtual Machines Performance dashboard presents you with a plethora of information about your virtual machines. We recommend you use this dashboard while zooming into a specific group or individual virtual machine by using a filtering capability of the dashboards.

Time savings with integrated alerting

While an important differentiator for Google Cloud VMware Engine is that Google manages VMware infrastructure and Google Site Reliability Engineers monitor critical vCenter events, you might be interested in collecting logs and metrics from Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds for a range of observability use cases. Let’s consider a typical use case for an infrastructure admin at your company.

After a successful migration of their application to Google Cloud VMware Engine, the admin can use any of the metrics collected by the metrics agent, to create a policy through cloud alerting and alert themselves via a channel of their choice (SMS, email, Slack notification, and more). The admin is alerted if CPU, memory, or storage reaches a threshold that they deem to be dangerous are violated. That way Cloud operations does the monitoring, and the admin only needs to check on the infrastructure when an alert is triggered.

An example alerting policy for CPU being higher than 95% for more than one minute

Power in unified logging and monitoring

Ultimately, the story would not be complete without your logging data. Current setup allows you to send your vCenter syslog to Cloud operations, too. Just like with metrics data, syslog data becomes available in Cloud Logging almost instantly. Let’s consider a typical use case for a Security Auditor.

After successfully integrating vCenter with your identity domain, you may consider auditing sign-in events by a local user in vCenter. In addition, you may want to receive an alert if such a local user is used. Using the following Log Filter you are able to determine when the (fictitious) local user “break_glass_user@gve.local” was used and from which IP address the event originated:

jsonPayload."@fields.privatecloud_name":your-private-cloud-name
jsonPayload.message:"Successful login break_glass_user@gve.local"

An example event is shown in the following screenshot of Cloud Logging. Note that the IP address of the source server of the login event is shown in the message field but grayed out in the screenshot.

Alerts to operators and security auditors can be configured in Cloud operations based on Log Filters. As a next step, you can create a logs-based metric, which measures the count of local user sign-ins. Create an alert policy in Cloud Monitoring based on the metric you just created and configure an appropriate notification channel for alerts (email, Slack Channel, PubSub, etc.). Incidents will be visible in Cloud Monitoring for your review and acknowledgement:

We’re just getting started

While Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring makes many advanced tools available to you right now, we’ve just started to build out its functionality. We have an aggressive roadmap to make integration completely setup free, adding more metrics, providing visibility into workloads and workload VMs, and making the most important information available to you at your fingertips. To learn more, check out our monitoring documentation.

8 ways Google Cloud elevates agility and security for financial services

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 18:30:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic brought dramatic changes to the financial services industry. Already under pressure from nimble young fintechs to modernize, established banks and insurers were undergoing incremental digital transformation. But in 2020, they hit the gas pedal. Branches closed and remote work became the norm. Almost overnight, employees needed secure remote access to corporate systems, and customers expected to be able to complete even complex transactions whenever they wanted, on whatever device. Even as things return to normal, many of these shifts are likely to be permanent. According to Forrester Research, nearly 90% of global financial services CIOs and SVPs believe that improving their application portfolio is key to improving customer experience and driving revenue.¹ The problem? Replacing legacy systems with cloud-based SaaS enterprise software is a massive, time- and resource-intensive process.

IDG’s recently completed white paper, Financial Services Spotlight: Elevating agility and security in the cloud, highlights an alternative to the all-or-nothing approach to replatforming: “lifting and shifting” on-premises applications and workloads to the cloud without rewriting them. In this way, you keep your organization’s familiar architecture, but give it the scalability and cutting-edge technology of a modern cloud environment. That’s the promise of Google Cloud VMware Engine brings to the financial services industry.

Here’s a quick overview of the insights that the IDG study uncovers. Download the complete white paper.

Simpler migration, rich rewards

Google Cloud VMware Engine helps financial services companies seamlessly migrate and run

VMware workloads natively on Google Cloud. Once in the cloud, firms can take advantage of Google Cloud services, access a robust third-party cloud ecosystem, and use the same VMware tools, processes, and policies their teams already know. The IDG study found that migrating to Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine offers multiple benefits:

Create new customer experiences. Migrating to Google Cloud puts modern, cloud-native architectures and technologies — such as containers and microservices — easily within reach. These make it possible for financial institutions to quickly and securely launch new applications and update them on a continuous basis using DevOps pipelines. They also allow firms to craft more personalized customer experiences across channels using Google Cloud’s native AI and data analytics.
Deliver new services. After migrating, financial services organizations can connect to multiple third-party service providers via cloud-based APIs to bring new, diverse services to their customers — without having to build from scratch.
Make the best use of IT resources. When your data and applications reside in Google Cloud, you’re no longer constrained by the physical storage and compute limits of on-premises infrastructure. This means your company can match capacity to demand — even during unexpected peaks. You also gain more visibility into your hybrid cloud environment with Google Cloud’s operations suite, which offers intelligent analysis and easier troubleshooting for your platform and applications.
Gain fresh insights. The key to understanding what customers need and when they need it resides within your data, and data analytics in the cloud help you uncover those insights. Your company can connect to Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse, BigQuery, which leverages data to deliver valuable insights for personalized customer experiences, rich compliance reporting, new product development, intelligent fraud detection, and more.
Choose what to move. Data governance regulations and requirements specific to the financial services industry mean that some data must remain on premises. Google Cloud VMware Engine lets you easily manage a hybrid cloud/on-premises environment to keep sensitive data fully under your control.
Become more resilient. Google Cloud VMware Engine gives financial services firms a distributed architecture and centralized control for their applications to support vital business continuity functions, such as backup and disaster recovery. This is on top of the performance and availability of Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.
Improve security. Using cloud-native application frameworks, administrators can issue patches and software updates centrally and automatically across their organizations. This reduces the risk of errors and security vulnerabilities. Firms also tap into the security features and capabilities of Google Cloud, including always-on encryption and AI-powered threat detection.
Redirect IT resources. Migrating virtualized workloads to the cloud can free up talent and budget to develop new products and services — time that was previously spent on maintaining complex on-premises infrastructure. That means less effort spent keeping the lights on, and more resources directed toward creating innovative and differentiating customer experiences.

IDG research concluded that migrating business applications to Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine can help financial services companies stay ahead of change without incurring further technical debt from their legacy IT systems. Working with cloud-based systems can give your financial services company much of the scale, speed, and agility of a startup while still enjoying the benefits of being an established organization.

Read the complete white paper to learn more about the ways in which Google and VMware work together to accelerate digital transformation for financial services firms.

^{1. Vmware-forrester-financial-services-modern-app-report.pdf, A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of VMware, 2020}

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0000

We’ve made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine in recent weeks—today’s post provides a recap of our latest milestones. Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade VMware stack running natively in Google Cloud. This cloud service is one of the fastest paths to the cloud for VMware workloads without making changes to existing applications or operating models across 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.

In fact, Mitel, a global provider of unified communications-as-a-service to 70 million business users across 100 countries, migrated 1,000 VMware instances to Google Cloud VMware Engine in less than 90 days and improved its monthly operational output four times.

In our last update, we focused on several innovative capabilities around networking, reach, and scale. Let us take a look at the highlights we released since our last installment.

Fast provisioning of a dedicated, intrinsically secure VMware private cloud

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can spin up a VMware private cloud in about 30 minutes. You can also scale your VMware-based infrastructure on-demand with dedicated hosts located in secure Google data centers. Let us look at what’s new:

Autoscale: The ability to elastically and programmatically manage infrastructure resources to align with business needs or what is called “right-sizing” is a core capability of an IaaS platform. With autoscale, Google Cloud VMware Engine users can leverage policy-driven automation to scale the nodes needed to meet the compute demands of the VMware infrastructure.

Autoscale:

Addresses seasonal spikes in demand, gradual increases of utilization, or new projects being onboarded or expanded due to disaster recovery events.
Analyzes the CPU, memory, and storage utilization to give you the controls to scale Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes up or down.
Ensures that storage consumption does not exceed the recommended limits for maintaining the Google Cloud VMware Engine service-level agreement.
Reduces overhead on IT teams by automating capacity monitoring and enabling sufficient availability of resources based on thresholds. Note that safeguards for maintaining minimum capacity and maximum capacity can be configured to ensure there are boundaries to the automation.

Learn how to set up Autoscale.

Mumbai region availability

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Mumbai region. This brings the availability of the service to 12 regions globally, enabling our multi-national and regional customers to leverage a VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service platform on Google Cloud. For more details, please read the press release.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

With 99.99% availability for a cluster in a single zone, fully dedicated 100 Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription, and all nonvolatile memory express storage, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides the highest performance required for the most demanding workloads. Let us look at what’s new:

Preview - Google Cloud KMS integration: You already have the ability to bring your own keys to encrypt your vSAN datastores. With this new capability, organizations that want to eliminate the overhead of managing external key providers can leverage a Google managed key provider, using Cloud KMS. This brings increased flexibility in securing workloads and data by enabling vSAN encryption by default for newly instantiated VMware Private Clouds. This feature is currently in Preview.

HIPAA compliance: Since April, Google Cloud VMware Engine is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. This opens the service up to healthcare organizations, that can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications. Read more in this blog.

NSX-T support for Active Directory: With NSX-T support for Active Directory, you can now leverage your on-premises Active Directory as one of the lightweight directory access protocol identity sources for user authentication into NSX-T manager. This extends the theme of being able to leverage your on-premises tools with Google Cloud VMware Engine. For more information, read the documentation on how to set up identity sources.

vSAN TRIM/UNMAP support: For space-efficiency, vSAN allows creating thin-provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data. However, files that are deleted within the guest operating system (OS) do not result in vSAN freeing up space allocated. To increase space efficiency, guest OS file systems have the ability to reclaim capacity that is no longer used, using TRIM/UNMAP commands. vSAN is fully aware of these commands that are sent from the guest OS and enables reclamation of previously allocated storage as free space. We have enabled TRIM/UNMAP for vSan by default in Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Simplicity in experience and operations

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you only need to worry about your workloads—not patching, upgrading, and updating the solution layer, for fewer interoperability issues and infrastructure maintenance. IIn addition, we have pre-built service accounts to enable your third-party VMware-supported tools and solutions to work seamlessly in VMware Engine. Access to Google services privately over local connections is also natively supported, enabling enrichment of existing applications and modernization over time. Finally, this service brings the power of Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) design by natively providing multi-VPC, multi-region networking that’s unique. Let’s look at what’s new:

Dashboards for Day 2 operations: To speed up cloud transformation and enable efficiency, Google Cloud VMware Engine administrators can take advantage of Cloud Operations dashboards for the solution. In addition, administrators can create custom policies through cloud alerting and enable notifications via channels of their choice (SMS, email, Slack, and more). For more details on how to set up cloud monitoring, please refer to Setting up Cloud Monitoring.

For the latest updates, bookmark Google Cloud VMware Engine release notes.

^{Thanks to Manish Lohani, Product Management, Google Cloud; Nargis Sakhibova, Product Management, Google Cloud; and Wade Holmes, Solutions Management, Google Cloud; for their contributions to this blog post.}

VMware Engine

Broadcom’s VMware license changes as they relate to Google Cloud VMware Engine

Helpful resources

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

Support for VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation license portability

Increased choice of node types

New cost savings with commitments

Significant incentives to reduce TCO

Convertible commitments

How to set up Google Cloud VMware Engine regional disaster recovery with VMware Site Recovery Manager

Architecture

Prerequisites

Set up disaster recovery for SRM

What’s new with Google Cloud VMware Engine: New node type, networking, automation and more

New Flexible ve2 node platform

New locations for broader reach

Optimizing TCO for storage-heavy environments

More simplicity, scale and consistency through networking, automation and console experience

Improving security through more transparency and control

Google Cloud VMware Engine Protected

What’s new with VMware Engine: New regions and more capabilities for storage, availability, data protection and more

Helping Arapahoe County operate more efficiently with Google Cloud

Modernizing infrastructure for more cost-effective & efficient services

A familiar platform lets IT teams focus on mission-critical work

Powering the future of Arapahoe County

What Google Cloud VMware Engine can do for you: Three customers talk TCO

How VMware Engine makes migration seamless

Google Cloud VMware Engine: Your onramp to digital transformation

How to use NetApp CVS as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine

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

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

Presence at VMware Explore 2022 and Google Next ‘22

Load balancing Google Cloud VMware Engine with Traffic Director

Scenario #1 - External load balancer

Scenario #2 - Internal load balancer

Conclusion

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: Single nodes, certifications and more

Understanding Google Cloud’s VMware Engine Migration Process and Performance

How Google Cloud and partners can accelerate your migration success

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

1. Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking

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

3. Global networking without complex routing

4. Integrated multi-VPC networking

5. Unified, cloud-integrated model

6. Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility

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

Save big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GA

Optimize the cost of your Google Cloud VMware Engine deployments

Google Cloud VMware Engine Billing Principles

Cost Optimization Strategy #1: Apply Committed Use Discounts

Cost Optimization Strategy #2: Optimize your Storage Consumption

Cost Optimization Strategy #3: Rightsize ESXi Clusters

Cost Optimization Strategy #4: Review Resource Utilization of Workloads

Managing Cost Optimization - People and Process

Call to Action

Best practices for optimizing your cloud costs

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: Single nodes, certifications and more

Using BigQuery with data sources in Google Cloud VMware Engine

Why?

What does this cover?

Cloud Data Fusion:

Google Cloud Datastream:

How to get started?

Conclusion:

Monitoring made simple for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud operations suite

VMware and Google Cloud: The next chapter

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.

Making VMware migrations to Google Cloud simpler than ever

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.

Monitoring made simple for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud operations suite

Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring brings infrastructure data in a single portal

Google Cloud VMWare Engine logs and metrics collection architecture

Transitioning to Google Cloud VMware Engine monitoring is simple

Simplicity beyond setup

Time savings with integrated alerting

Power in unified logging and monitoring

We’re just getting started

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.