VMware Engine

Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed VMware-as-a-service solution that lets you run VMware workloads natively on Google Cloud infrastructure. It enables seamless migration of VMware-based workloads without refactoring applications.

Key Features:

1. Full VMware stack - Runs vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and vCenter natively on GCP.

2. Lift-and-shift migration - Move VMware VMs to GCP without changing any application code.

3. Native GCP integration - Direct access to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and other GCP services.

4. Dedicated hardware - Dedicated bare-metal nodes with high-performance NVMe storage.

5. Consistent operations - Use existing VMware tools, skills, and processes in the cloud.

The below example shows how to provision a VMware Engine private cloud and migrate a VM using gcloud.

It gives the following output,

NAME               LOCATION       STATE   NODE_COUNT
my-private-cloud   us-central1-a  ACTIVE  3

vCenter URL: https://192.168.0.2/ui
Username: [email protected]

Migration Approaches with VMware Engine:

HCX (Hybrid Cloud Extension) - Live migration of running VMs with zero downtime using vMotion over the internet.

Cold migration - Export VMware VMs as OVF/OVA and import into VMware Engine. Requires brief downtime.

Replication - Use VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for disaster recovery and planned migrations.