
Announcing Google Cloud VMware Engine - v7p1Qbt1im
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-cloud-vmware-engine
======
simonebrunozzi
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.

~~~
Operyl
Ugh. IBM bought SoftLayer and have been slowly destroying it with bureaucracy
since then. I had a support agent tell me the other day "all servers become
unstable after 90 days." I miss the old support team :(. These days it's a lot
of "what the hell did the hypervisor do to my VM this time".

~~~
indymike
True story. I just realized I've had an AWS EC2 tiny instance up since 2016.
It has been unstable, never.

~~~
brian_cunnie
On at least two occasions I was forced to recreate an instance on AWS. They
send out an email similar to this:

> We have important news about your account (AWS Account ID: 288053528466).
> EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon
> EC2 instance (instance-ID: i-0480b1eb4617c84f3) in the us-east-1 region. Due
> to this degradation, your instance could already be unreachable. After
> 2016-08-16 01:00 UTC your instance, which has an EBS volume as the root
> device, will be stopped.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Could live-migration prevent that happening today? Depends on the nature of
the degradation I imagine.

~~~
roomey
That's where VMware on aws comes in ;) you get vmotion, so no downtime due to
planned maintenance

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I was thinking of live migration performed by AWS. Are there situations where
running your own VMware could help, beyond what AWS can do themselves? If
there's a sudden outage, neither helps, as the instance disappears. If there's
a minor issue, either should be possible.

~~~
jlgaddis
Well, if your instance is important enough, there's vSphere Fault Tolerance
[0]:

> _You can use vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for most mission critical virtual
> machines. FT provides continuous availability for such a virtual machine by
> creating and maintaining another VM that is identical and continuously
> available to replace it in the event of a failover situation._

> _The protected virtual machine is called the Primary VM. The duplicate
> virtual machine, the Secondary VM, is created and runs on another host. The
> primary VM is continuously replicated to the secondary VM so that the
> secondary VM can take over at any point, thereby providing Fault Tolerant
> protection._

> _..._

\---

[0]: [https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-
vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsp...](https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-
vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-623812E6-D253-4FBC-B3E1-6FBFDF82ED21.html)

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rckoepke
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?

~~~
techntoke
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
The public clouds are ridiculously more expensive than on-prem; especially for
egress. That’s an open secret; people choose clouds for the convenience.

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CodeSheikh
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
It's Turtles all the way down.

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

~~~
service_bus
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.

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nerdbaggy
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.

~~~
frostmatthew
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-
vm...](https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vmotion.html)

------
henvic
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)

