Google Cloud VMware Engine – Smoothing the way to the cloud.

VMware Engine provides a public cloud consisting of a hyper converged compute, storage, and networking stack that is deployed on the Google Cloud infrastructure in various Google Cloud locations around the world. Each private cloud includes a vCenter Server instance that manages several ESXi nodes in one or several vSphere clusters together with the corresponding Virtual SAN (vSAN) storage. VMware Engine is sold by the node with the minimum configuration being three nodes, going up to a maximum of 64 nodes per private cloud. You can create as many private clouds as you like. If you run your workloads in a native VMware environment that itself is running in a dedicated VMware software stack in the Google Cloud, you can migrate and run all your on-site virtualised workloads without having to make any changes there as well. They use the same VMware tools you already know and trust including, for example, vSphere, vCenter, vROPS and vMotion. All VMware licences required for the service are included: ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T and HCX. 

Another benefit of VMware Engine is that it provides access to the entire vSphere ecosystem with established third-party IT management tools, as well as the complete vSphere core platform and your standard vCenter interface. You can use a wide variety of features, including deployment, monitoring, security, network and IP address management, and identity management, which can all be managed on a single dashboard. VMware Engine delivers privilege extension that enables you to install and manage third-party applications that require administrative access to vCenter. On request, your privileges can be increased for a period of up to 24 hours to make limited configuration changes to vCenter. Afterwards the environment is automatically locked down for security reasons.  

The service supports all standard VMware migration tools such as vMotion and HCX. vMotion is best suited for migrating individual workloads without interrupting the service. In this deployment scenario, you link up your private cloud with your local environment via a dedicated connection tunnel that allows the on-premise management and vMotion subnets to communicate with the private cloud management and vMotion subnets. This in turn enables Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC vMotion). A full HCX licence is also included, allowing you to migrate workloads en masse while enabling L2 connectivity and vMotion or Storage vMotion workflows without having to change IP addresses.  

For IT teams, monitoring the performance and availability of operating systems, middleware and applications running in physical, virtual and cloud environments in-house is complex and time-consuming and tends to make innovation infeasible. VMware Engine automatically determines the most appropriate level of probes and error logs to suit your organisation. The solution comes with a sub-system for continuous performance monitoring so that issues can be quickly detected and resolved. If, for example, a hardware error is detected, a new node is added to the private cloud and the one that has failed is removed. 

As all VMware Engine edge network services—including VPN, public IP and internet gateways—run on Google Cloud, they inherit the basic network security and DDoS protection provided by it. This applies as much to Google Cloud as to dedicated private VMware environments. 

With VMware Engine, you can ensure that data at rest and being transmitted are protected. Data at rest in a private cloud environment can be encrypted using software-based vSAN encryption which works with certified third-party key management servers located on your own network or on-premise, and you can easily control and manage the encryption keys yourself. When data is transmitted, applications are expected to encrypt their network communications within internal network segments. vSphere supports encryption of data for vMotion traffic.