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Google Cloud to begin supporting VMware workloads

The new partnership will give Google Cloud customers more ways to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Google Cloud on Monday confirmed it's partnering with VMware to begin supporting VMware workloads. The partnership will further Google Cloud's stepped up efforts to cater to enterprise customers looking for ways to operate hybrid cloud environments. 

The new service will let customers run VMware vSphere-based workloads in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), leveraging a platform administered by CloudSimple. Once an organization has migrated their VMware workloads to a VMware software-defined data center (SDCC) running in GCP, they will have full, native access to the full VMware stack including vCenter, vSAN and NSX-T. 

Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate VP at Google Cloud, explained to ZDNet that CloudSimple offers unique technology not only for the migration of VMware workloads but for the ability to create an elastic, scalable consumption model for customers. 

Google says it will provide the first line of support to customers while working closely with CloudSimple to offer support and the appropriate SLAs. "Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple" will be available on the Google Cloud Marketplace later this year. 

"Our partnership with Google Cloud has always been about addressing customers' needs, and we're excited to extend the partnership to enable our mutual customers to run VMware workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation in Google Cloud Platform," VMware's Sanjay Poonen said in a statement. "With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all of the familiarity and investment protection of VMware tools and training as they execute on their cloud strategies, and rapidly bring new services to market and operate them seamlessly and more securely across a hybrid cloud environment."

The partnership was driven in large part by joint customers coming to Google and VMware with unique use cases, Ichhpurani said. Some customers are saying they want to exit their data center all together, while others want to drum up new applications in an elastic model. Other customers, meanwhile, may be running VMware on premise but want to run their Test and Dev or disaster recovery environments on GCP. 

The arrangement is similar to the cloud deal VMware announced with Microsoft earlier this year. The Azure VMware Solutions, which lets users to redeploy VMware workloads natively on Azure, also relies on CloudSimple's platform. 

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services forged a close partnership with VMware back in 2016

For its part, Google Cloud has spent this year 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. Google has also introduced new tools like the Anthos platform to enable hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

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