GCP – New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: improved reach, networking and scale

Every enterprise is striving to adopt a cloud-first strategy, but making that happen is easier said than done. Google Cloud VMware Engine simplifies the challenges of moving and modernizing critical workloads to the cloud, letting you seamlessly migrate your VMware workloads from on-premises data centers directly into Google Cloud.

We have been hard at work in the new year developing features to help make networking simpler and improve security management; this blog highlights a few of the innovative features we released recently: 

• Improved networking support: Multi-region networking, connectivity from multiple VPCs, Cloud DNS for management across global deployments, end-to-end dynamic routing, and support for reserved blocks as well as non-private addresses.

• Improved scalability and support for the VMware platform: vSphere/vSAN version 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0, larger clusters, HCX migration support, ESXi host configuration retention, and enhanced password management.

• Improved reach: regional presence in two new regions: Montreal and São Paulo

Multi-region networking
Large scale deployments often span geographies. You may want a VMware environment deployed in Virginia to communicate with one that’s deployed in Frankfurt. In a typical cloud context, you have to configure special networking between the two regions, often requiring a VPN-based tunnel over the WAN to ensure uniform network addressing. This adds to deployment and operational complexity as well as cost. 

Google Cloud solves this problem in a unique way. VPCs support global routing, which allows a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region worldwide. VMware Engine now also supports this capability. With this support, global deployment scenarios become very straightforward: when you create a private cloud in any of the regions supported worldwide, you get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them without having to configure any special connectivity.

Multiple VPC connectivity
Often, users have application deployments in different VPC networks such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service now supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to VMware Engine networks, allowing you to retain existing architectures deployed and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments.

Cloud DNS integration
Users deploy their applications in private clouds in different regions for latency, data sovereignty or backup reasons. However, each private cloud comes with its own DNS endpoint. If your private clouds are deployed in multiple regions, maintaining separate DNS resolution for each of them creates added complexity. We’ve simplified this by enabling the use of Cloud DNS with VMware Engine. This feature allows you to resolve the domain names of management components of multiple private clouds (in the same or different regions) in your Google Cloud project. This tremendously simplifies your deployment globally with a single DNS management point.

Flexible networking architectures
When you’re coming from on-premises contexts, you may have a number of network configuration options that you would like to bring over. These include the use of custom or reserved-block Public IP (non RFC-1918) or RFC 6598 (non-private) address ranges. VMware Engine now supports the use of custom/reserved-block addresses for workload or management networks, and RFC 6598 address ranges for use on management networks. This gets you the compatibility and design flexibility you need for some scenarios, minimizing the changes required for your move to the cloud.

vSphere 7 support
All new VMware Engine private clouds are now deployed with VMware vSphere version 7.0 and NSX-T version 3.0. You get plenty of new features, enhanced flexibility and improved performance.

Larger clusters
With larger deployments, you often need to create multiple clusters and private clouds. This increases complexity and management overhead. VMware Engine now supports large clusters—up to 32 hosts per cluster. You can now scale as large as your applications need. 

HCX cloud-to-cloud migration
Often, the cloud is home for your applications, and you need to migrate not just from on-premises, but between cloud locations as well. With HCX cloud-cloud migration, you can now migrate your VMs between two VMware Engine private clouds. And with Global Routing, it’s fast and easy to move across geographies without having to set up complex tunnels. It is now easier to update your deployment plan and cloud architecture even after you have completed your cloud migrations.

ESXi host configuration retention across reboots
Many VMware Engine users have ESXi host-specific configurations such as vSphere labels, vSphere custom attributes, vSphere tags, and affinity and anti-affinity rules. These usually have to be rebuilt when a host is replaced in the event of a failure. With this feature, node customizations now transfer from the failed node to the replacement node.

Enhanced password management
Managing passwords can be a full time job and lead to much frustration if you don’t have a way to keep track of the passwords easily. VMware Engine now supports default password management of VMware services like vCenter, NSX, HCX and allows resetting of passwords. Random, secure passwords are generated by default right in the VMware UI, which is accessed via the VMware Engine console. The result is easier and more secure password management without ever having to swivel out of that management interface.

Availability in Canada and Brazil
We are excited to announce the availability of VMware Engine in our São Paulo and Montréal data centers to support diverse users across the North and South American continents. Customers who already use VMware can migrate to Google Cloud more easily without the need for transformation in their local regions. Among the benefits for enterprises are the ability to manage data and applications in-country and to pay for services in local currency. VMware Engine is now supported in ten regions.

Discounts still available
We’re committed to making it simple to get started with VMware Engine and help you optimize your consumption up front. Our fully managed service offers the highest density storage and memory per core to help reduce your total cost of ownership. For a limited time, we’re offering a 12% discount on all VMware Engine SKUs with a new agreement (contact sales for more information). We’ve also developed an online pricing calculator to help you calculate costs up front, enabling you to configure and estimate your costs based on different commitment terms, number of instances, and regions.

Join our webinar on February 23
Join our vMug webinar on Feb 23, 9 AM PT, A unique approach to VMware-as-a-Service with Google Cloud VMware Engine. We’ll show you how you can quickly migrate to the cloud to unify operations and increase operational efficiency, without re-architecting applications. We’ll cover common challenges, key use cases, and show you how you can plug into native Google Cloud services such as Cloud AI, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. And, we’ll provide you access to our hands-on lab so you can test drive VMware Engine to get a feel for how few steps you need to move to Google Cloud. Hope to see you there!