8 ms·

Announcing Google Cloud VMware Engine

180 points by v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rckoepke 6y ago
I can't find this in my cloud console. The info pages are all pushing the "Contact a sales rep" button. It's not clear whether all the pricing info is included yet. They lists one possible node at $10/hour ($7200/mo) before contract length discounts: > CPU: 2.6 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) x2, 36 cores/72 hyperthreads > Memory: 768 GB > Data: 19.2 TB NVMe > Cache: 3.2 TB NVMe I could already import VMDK's to run in GCE. Obviously this is not intended for that, but rather to provide vSphere/vCenter/ESXi in the cloud. Where I've used these in the past (for relatively low-tech IIoT work), I'd often "pull" the VM's off the on-prem server and run 4-12 VM's on my laptop to simulate and configure machines for chemical plants. If I was in the office, I could RDP into the machines running on the on-prem server and would be able to enjoy a high performing desktop environment. Obviously as I was in the same building as the vSphere/ESXi host, latency was very low. I've had significant issues with latency in the past trying to use RDP/VNC/etc from Houston to any of GCP's datacenters and wonder if that would affect quality of service for this offering. Will a lot of users be remoting into these VM's to use boxes running Windows/GUI/etc? Or is this a very different use case?
- sl1ck731 6y ago
  I don't believe it is available yet. > Google Cloud VMware Engine is expected to be generally available to customers this quarter in the North Virginia (us-east4) and Los Angeles (us-west2) regions. > We plan for the service to be available globally in eight additional regions—London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Montréal, São Paulo, Singapore, and Netherlands—in the second half of the calendar year.
- techntoke 6y ago
  With the latest ThreadRipper would probably be the same price after 3 months of service to buy the equipment. If you're running more than 3 servers, most likely you are, then you can add 5 2TB (10TB) per node of M.2 SSDs which are super fast for cache, and cheaper SATA SSDs for regular storage and cluster the storage using Rook (Ceph). Most expensive thing is RAM. There are a lot of great colo facilities for this type of hardware. Using secure boot, TPM, LUKS and tamper detection, it sure would be hard to break into your server even if not caged. Most of these facilities have video cams and modern security protocols. However, if you can migrate your workloads to Kubernetes with KubeVirt and others then I'd advise you avoid VMware like the plague.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    The public clouds are ridiculously more expensive than on-prem; especially for egress. That’s an open secret; people choose clouds for the convenience.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Funny how things evolve over time. When I was (2014-2016) VP/CTO at vCloud Air, the cloud division of VMware, I spearheaded the partnership between VMware and GCP/Google (which of course took a much larger team to be brought to life), certain that it was the only viable and meaningful partnership for VMware at the time. When I left in early 2016, soon thereafter VMware ditched that partnership in favor of... IBM. No comment. And now it's 2020, IBM is far behind everyone else in the cloud, and VMware and Google are cranking along just fine. This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them. AWS is eventually going to lose its "monopoly" over cloud (disclaimer: I was at AWS 2008-2014). It gives me a good feeling. Especially for the very talented engineers that I met on both sides. Sometimes they have to put up with a ton of red tape and politics. At least this will make some of them smile.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Was there a strategic shift to kubernetes now inside VMWARE? I don't know that this start as early as 2014. Great work though. The transition to partnering with IBM is baffling just like what you express.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    > Was there a strategic shift to kubernetes now inside VMWARE? Oh yes. Very much so. Disclosure: I work for VMware.
- throwaway265731 6y ago
  > This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them GCP purchased CloudSimple who provides managed VMWare running on bare metal. This isn't a solution co-developed between VMWare and GCP, nor is this a 1st party VMWare solution. I'm not even sure if this is running on GCE, or if its just a re-branding of CloudSimple as GCP VMWare Engine VMWare Cloud on AWS was built by VMWare to run on AWS ec2 bare-metal instances, and is managed by VMWare themselves. While similar, they are different.
  - tootie 6y ago
nerdbaggy 6y ago
I wish in VMware vSphere I could easily spin up and down / offline migrate to cloud providers. I have some temporary heavy workloads that could benefit from this but there is no easy way.
- moondev 6y ago
  In a Kubernetes context can do this with Cluster API. I run my mgmt cluster in vSphere which spins up workload clusters in vSphere and AWS on demand. Works great! https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html
- frostmatthew 6y ago
  VMware Cloud on AWS[1] allows for a hybrid on-prem/cloud environment and even supports vMotion between the two[2]. [1] https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws [2] https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vmotion.html https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vm...
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  VMware's entire strategy at the moment appears to be hybrid/multi-cloud and Kubernetes. If you can't do that already (and I'm fairly certain you can), you shouldn't have to wait much longer -- as this "partnership" and their others e.g., with AWS) illustrate.
CodeSheikh 6y ago
My NodeJs app running inside a Docker container which is running inside a Linux Debian OS running as one of the VMs inside a Windows OS installed on a rack-mount server module housed with other modules in a server cabinet. The "atomic" structure of cloud infra.
- lsiebert 6y ago
  It's Turtles all the way down.
rodgerd 6y ago
All the expense of the cloud, with all of the flexibility and feature set of traditional virtualization.
- techntoke 6y ago
  I imagine that in an alternate universe it is like inception for computers.
- service_bus 6y ago
  Traditional virtualization still requires you to pay for your own power, cooling, redundancy, SAN, backup, network, etc. Not every company has the need to staff all of these specialists.
henvic 6y ago
Shameless plug that might be of interest to someone interested in trying this out for fun: I recently posted about installing and trying the VMware ESXi hypervisor to create a homelab here: https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/ https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375

180 points by v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

I can't find this in my cloud console. The info pages are all pushing the "Contact a sales rep" button. It's not clear whether all the pricing info is included yet. They lists one possible node at $10/hour ($7200/mo) before contract length discounts: > CPU: 2.6 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) x2, 36 cores/72 hyperthreads > Memory: 768 GB > Data: 19.2 TB NVMe > Cache: 3.2 TB NVMe I could already import VMDK's to run in GCE. Obviously this is not intended for that, but rather to provide vSphere/vCenter/ESXi in the cloud. Where I've used these in the past (for relatively low-tech IIoT work), I'd often "pull" the VM's off the on-prem server and run 4-12 VM's on my laptop to simulate and configure machines for chemical plants. If I was in the office, I could RDP into the machines running on the on-prem server and would be able to enjoy a high performing desktop environment. Obviously as I was in the same building as the vSphere/ESXi host, latency was very low. I've had significant issues with latency in the past trying to use RDP/VNC/etc from Houston to any of GCP's datacenters and wonder if that would affect quality of service for this offering. Will a lot of users be remoting into these VM's to use boxes running Windows/GUI/etc? Or is this a very different use case?

sl1ck731 6y ago
I don't believe it is available yet. > Google Cloud VMware Engine is expected to be generally available to customers this quarter in the North Virginia (us-east4) and Los Angeles (us-west2) regions. > We plan for the service to be available globally in eight additional regions—London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Montréal, São Paulo, Singapore, and Netherlands—in the second half of the calendar year.
techntoke 6y ago
With the latest ThreadRipper would probably be the same price after 3 months of service to buy the equipment. If you're running more than 3 servers, most likely you are, then you can add 5 2TB (10TB) per node of M.2 SSDs which are super fast for cache, and cheaper SATA SSDs for regular storage and cluster the storage using Rook (Ceph). Most expensive thing is RAM. There are a lot of great colo facilities for this type of hardware. Using secure boot, TPM, LUKS and tamper detection, it sure would be hard to break into your server even if not caged. Most of these facilities have video cams and modern security protocols. However, if you can migrate your workloads to Kubernetes with KubeVirt and others then I'd advise you avoid VMware like the plague.
- dannyw 6y ago
  The public clouds are ridiculously more expensive than on-prem; especially for egress. That’s an open secret; people choose clouds for the convenience.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Funny how things evolve over time. When I was (2014-2016) VP/CTO at vCloud Air, the cloud division of VMware, I spearheaded the partnership between VMware and GCP/Google (which of course took a much larger team to be brought to life), certain that it was the only viable and meaningful partnership for VMware at the time. When I left in early 2016, soon thereafter VMware ditched that partnership in favor of... IBM. No comment. And now it's 2020, IBM is far behind everyone else in the cloud, and VMware and Google are cranking along just fine. This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them. AWS is eventually going to lose its "monopoly" over cloud (disclaimer: I was at AWS 2008-2014). It gives me a good feeling. Especially for the very talented engineers that I met on both sides. Sometimes they have to put up with a ton of red tape and politics. At least this will make some of them smile.

justicezyx 6y ago
Was there a strategic shift to kubernetes now inside VMWARE? I don't know that this start as early as 2014. Great work though. The transition to partnering with IBM is baffling just like what you express.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  > Was there a strategic shift to kubernetes now inside VMWARE? Oh yes. Very much so. Disclosure: I work for VMware.
throwaway265731 6y ago
> This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them GCP purchased CloudSimple who provides managed VMWare running on bare metal. This isn't a solution co-developed between VMWare and GCP, nor is this a 1st party VMWare solution. I'm not even sure if this is running on GCE, or if its just a re-branding of CloudSimple as GCP VMWare Engine VMWare Cloud on AWS was built by VMWare to run on AWS ec2 bare-metal instances, and is managed by VMWare themselves. While similar, they are different.
- tootie 6y ago

nerdbaggy 6y ago

I wish in VMware vSphere I could easily spin up and down / offline migrate to cloud providers. I have some temporary heavy workloads that could benefit from this but there is no easy way.

moondev 6y ago
In a Kubernetes context can do this with Cluster API. I run my mgmt cluster in vSphere which spins up workload clusters in vSphere and AWS on demand. Works great! https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html
frostmatthew 6y ago
VMware Cloud on AWS[1] allows for a hybrid on-prem/cloud environment and even supports vMotion between the two[2]. [1] https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws [2] https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vmotion.html https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vm...
jlgaddis 6y ago
VMware's entire strategy at the moment appears to be hybrid/multi-cloud and Kubernetes. If you can't do that already (and I'm fairly certain you can), you shouldn't have to wait much longer -- as this "partnership" and their others e.g., with AWS) illustrate.

CodeSheikh 6y ago

My NodeJs app running inside a Docker container which is running inside a Linux Debian OS running as one of the VMs inside a Windows OS installed on a rack-mount server module housed with other modules in a server cabinet. The "atomic" structure of cloud infra.

lsiebert 6y ago
It's Turtles all the way down.

rodgerd 6y ago

All the expense of the cloud, with all of the flexibility and feature set of traditional virtualization.

techntoke 6y ago
I imagine that in an alternate universe it is like inception for computers.
service_bus 6y ago
Traditional virtualization still requires you to pay for your own power, cooling, redundancy, SAN, backup, network, etc. Not every company has the need to staff all of these specialists.

henvic 6y ago

Shameless plug that might be of interest to someone interested in trying this out for fun: I recently posted about installing and trying the VMware ESXi hypervisor to create a homelab here: https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/ https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375