The post-pandemic world is cloud-based. Global market intelligence firm IDC predicts that 80% of enterprises will rapidly accelerate their cloud migrations throughout 2021.
However, cloud migration can be easier said than done. While many workloads can be easily lifted and shifted, highly specialized workloads, such as those run on VMware, may not be suitable for cloud migration due to the extensive refactoring that would be required. Additionally, organizations would have to reskill team members accustomed to working in VMware.
Google Cloud VMware Engine solves these problems by providing a fully managed VMware-as-a-Service solution that enables organizations to deploy VMware workloads natively, on isolated and dedicated bare metal infrastructure. Most VMware workloads require few or no changes to be migrated to VMware Engine, which accelerates the migration process while minimizing risks, and there’s no need to replace third-party integrated products or reskill your teams.
Here are seven ways in which your organization will benefit from running your VMware workloads on Google Cloud VMware Engine:
1. Scalability and reliability
VMware Engine is built on Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) highly performant, scalable infrastructure, with fully redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking and a 99.99% availability SLA. By default, Google launches a three-node cluster for your private cloud, giving you immediate access to a highly available cluster upon initial launch. If you need more capacity and performance, you can add up to 64 nodes to your hyper converged cluster.
2. Cost savings through reserved billing
Billing for VMware engine is on a per-node basis. In addition to hourly billing, VMware Engine customers can take advantage of reserved billing per node. Available in one- or three-year terms, reserved billing for nodes offers significant cost savings over an on-demand billing model.
3. Simplified licensing
Your private cloud on VMware Engine is inclusive of licensing, which includes VMware vCenter, vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX Advanced. There’s no need to worry about setting up licensing when launching workloads within these VMware modules, and any additional VMware or VMware partner products you need can be purchased via the Google Cloud Marketplace.
4. No more maintenance or upgrades
One of the biggest benefits to cloud migration is that organizations get to offload infrastructure maintenance and upgrades to a cloud provider. Running a VMware stack in a data center requires facility maintenance, security, hardware rack-stack, and cabling. VMware Engine provides a hassle-free infrastructure that frees up your team to work on internal projects that drive the business instead of getting bogged down in maintenance tasks. Google handles all lifecycle management of the VMware software stack, including all related infrastructure and upgrades. Google plans all upgrades ahead of time, and the Google team will add a new host to your cluster before they begin, ensuring that your cluster size always remains the same.
5. Enhanced security
VMware workloads run on VMware Engine are protected by multi-layered security. Proper IAM credentials are required to enable the private cloud and create VPC peering, and IAM tools are built into multiple layers of vSphere, NSX-T, and GCVE, enabling your administrators to exert fine-grained control over different aspects of security. For further access control, you can also integrate with Microsoft Active Directory.
6. Support for Oracle workloads
Many organizations run their Oracle databases, middleware, and applications on VMWare virtualized environments, and these workloads can be migrated to VMWare Engine while complying with Oracle’s licensing requirements. Oracle certifies its own operating systems for the VMware ESXi hypervisor used in Google Cloud VMware Engine, and Google is committed to working with VMware and Oracle to support Oracle workloads running in VMware Engine.
7. Seamless integration with GCP services
Running your VMware workloads on GCP VMware Engine gives you high-speed VLAN connectivity to all of GCP’s innovative cloud services, including BigQuery, Google’s serverless warehousing solution; and AI and ML tools that enable developers to build next-generation apps while leveraging the database that resides on your dedicated cloud; and third-party backup and disaster recovery services such as Actifio, which enables organizations to protect virtual copies of data in their native format, manage the copies throughout their entire lifecycle, and use them for tasks such as development and testing.
