News

VMware and Google Collaborate on Plug-in for Hybrid Cloud Provisioning

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 07/19/2018

Today, Google Inc. and VMware Inc. announced a preview version of a plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator, plus support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources in vRealize Automation, which will allow users to deploy and manage Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines (VMs).

According to the official VMware blog post announcing the companies' collaboration, the plug-in allows users to "start provisioning VMs and storage to GCP, as well as publish blueprints that include Google Compute VMs and storage buckets" into the user's self-service catalog. Example use cases for the plug-in, according to the blog post, include:

1. Reach new regions to address global business needs (Finland, Mumbai and Singapore).
2. Define large-scale applications using vRA and deploy to Google Compute Engine to leverage GCP's worldwide load balancing and automatic scaling.
3. Save money by deploying VMs as Compute Engine Preemptible VM Instances and using Custom Machine Types to tailor the VM configuration to application needs.
4. Accelerate the time it takes to train a machine learning model by using Compute Engine with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs.
5. Replicate on-premises-based applications to the cloud and scale up or down as a business dictates.

Users can request access to the early-release software and, according to VMware, the plug-in will be available soon in the VMware Solutions Exchange.

The official Google blog post also emphasized the fact that the companies are working together to "add support for additional GCP products such as Cloud TPUs." Information about that will be released in the coming months.