Google announces new integrated first-party offering with VMware

Google on Thursday took the next step in its partnership with VMware, announcing an integrated first-party service that lets customers migrate or run VMware environments in Google Cloud. The new Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers a fully-managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack on dedicated Google infrastructure. 

With the new service, customers can connect to a dedicated VMware environment directly through the Google Cloud Console to migrate or extend their on-premise workloads to the cloud. 

"VMware and Google Cloud are working together to help power customers' multi-cloud strategies, and the new Google Cloud VMware Engine will enable our mutual customers to drive digital transformation and business resiliency using the same VMware Cloud Foundation running in their data centers today," Ajay Patel, SVP and GM of VMware's cloud provider software business unit, said in a statement. "Google Cloud VMware Engine enables organizations to quickly deploy their VMware environment in Google Cloud, delivering scale, agility and access to cloud-native services while leveraging the familiarity and investment in VMware tools and training."

The service promises to minimize a company's operational burden with end-to-end support. Google Cloud manages the lifecycle of the VMware software stack and manages all related infrastructure and upgrades. Dedicated networking and networking services such as Interconnect and VPN provide for seamless connectivity and access to on-premise environments. 

For more than a year now, Google Cloud has been building up an enterprise customer-focused strategy, with the aim to make Google Cloud "the easiest cloud provider to do business with," according to Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian. 

That largely means enabling customers to run critical workloads in GCP, including VMware and SAP workloads. Last summer, Google Cloud announced it would begin supporting VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Then in the fall, the company acquired CloudSimple, makers of software that lets customers migrate and run VMware workloads natively in public clouds. 

For its part, VMware is "on a great journey to become the multi-cloud infrastructure provider of choice," CEO Pat Gelsinger said earlier this year. 

A couple of weeks ago, VMware and Microsoft announced Azure VMware Solutions to provide a native, supported VMware experience on Microsoft Azure. VMware also has a longstanding relationship with Amazon Web Services. The company also just announced the availability of the Alibaba Cloud VMware Solution in mainland China and Hong Kong.