VMware strikes public cloud partnership with Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will support VMware workloads as part of a partnership between the two companies to generate additional options for customers looking to run a hybrid cloud strategy.

Up to now, Google's cloud arm was the only major public cloud provider to not support VMware. Enterprise customers will, however, from later this year be able to run VMware workloads on the platform.

The Google Cloud VMware Solution, as it's dubbed, will use software-defined data centre tools including NSX networking, vSAN storage software provided by GCP, as well as vSphere compute. This will be governed through CloudSimple.

The partnership has not yet been formally announced, a spokesperson told IT Pro, but is being widely reported by a host of US titles including Bloomberg.

VMware will benefit from their customers given the flexibility to move workloads from their own servers to the public cloud, including existing Vmware tools, policies and practices, according to the firm's CEO Thomas Kurian.

The firm's customers will also be given access to Google's artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytic tools, as well as being able to deploy their apps to regions where Google has data centres. Moreover, these enterprises will also be able to run networking tools through GCP, beyond virtualisation software.

The partnership between GCP and VMware is similar in nature to other agreements struck between the virtualisation firm and rival public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).

These two companies, for instance, struck an agreement in late 2017 in which businesses could migrate their processes and apps to the public cloud. This was extended to Europe in March last year.

In April, meanwhile, Microsoft introduced native VMware support for its Azure cloud platform. The announcement meant customers were able to run their workloads in native environments, also through tools like vSphere, vSAN, vCenter and NSX, with workloads ported to Azure with relative ease.

VMware's latest partnership with GCP points towards its strengthening in the public cloud arena, as it aims to offer a greater scale of flexibility for its enterprise customers.