Google LLC today announced the debut of its long-awaited Google Cloud VMware Engine service, which makes it easy for customers run their on-premises VMware applications on the company’s public cloud infrastructure platform.

In a blog post introducing the new service, Google Cloud General Manager June Yang said VMware installations form the basis of many of its customers’ information technology environments. According to her, those customers are eager to move their VMware workloads to Google’s cloud, where they can tap into additional services more easily.

The Google Cloud VMware Engine service provides a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack, made up of its central components including vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T and VMware HCX, hosted in a dedicated environment on the company’s cloud infrastructure.

“With this service, you can migrate or extend your on-premises workloads to Google Cloud in minutes by connecting to a dedicated VMware environment directly through the Google Cloud Console,” Yang said. “This allows you to seamlessly migrate to the cloud without the cost or complexity of refactoring applications, and run and manage workloads consistently with your on-premises environment. By running your VMware workloads on Google Cloud, you reduce your operational burden while benefiting from scale and agility, and maintain continuity with your existing tools, policies and processes.”

Google Cloud VMware Engine has been in the making for some time. Google first announced support for customers running VMware workloads on its cloud last summer and followed up by acquiring a company called CloudSimple Inc., which enabled it to offer a fully integrated VMware-based service.

The launch of Google Cloud VMware Engine brings Google in step with its public cloud rivals Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which both have their own competing offerings – VMware Cloud on AWS and Azure VMware Solution.

Yang said the new service enables customers to spin up VMware software-defined data center environments on Google Cloud in a “matter of minutes,” which means they can scale their most critical business apps on-demand. The service is also VMware Cloud Verified, which is the highest level of validation for VMware cloud services.

“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,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud provider software business unit.

Because the service is fully managed, it means customers don’t need to worry about the operational burden of running VMware apps on Google Cloud. Google takes care of all the infrastructure-related tasks itself, and has partnered with top storage providers including NetApp Inc., Cohesity Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc. to offer the service.

Google Cloud VMware Engine also enables customers to tap into Google’s other cloud services, such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Anthos and Cloud AI, Yang said.

“As you look to migrate and modernize workloads over time, these cloud-native services allow you to streamline management, surface new data insights, and deliver new and innovative services to your customers,” she said.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., said enterprise workloads run on VMware and the cloud providers are trying to get them to their services.

“More load means better economies of scale, and that means growth for infrastructure-as-a-service vendors,” he said. “In that competition they try to provide the best plain vanilla VMware implementation they can, so that CxOs will choose their cloud infrastructure.”

Mueller said the ideal situation is that enterprises can move their VMware loads without having to retest a virtual machine after moving it to the cloud. “Coupled with google Cloud’s IaaS differentiators, this will be an attractive offering, but CxOs have the choice where to run their VMware loads, across all three major IaaS vendors,” he said.

The service has been available to early-access customers for several months already, and Google said the experience has been positive. Those customers include Deutsche Börse Group, a provider of capital markets infrastructure.

“As a long-term VMware customer we are keen to extend our large landscape towards hyperscaling options, keeping existing control planes and lifecycle management stable,” said Dr. Christoph Böhm, an executive board member and chief information officer of Deutsche Börse Group. “Google Cloud VMware Engine allows us now to quickly extend our VMware environment to Google Cloud, increasing our business agility and building even higher levels of resiliency.”

Google said the service is available now.

Image: Google