Hot on the heels of my post last week on the announcement of the general availability of the Azure VMware Solution, yesterday it was announced that the Google Cloud VMware Engine is also now generally available. The VMware presence in the hyperscale public clouds is looking pretty impressive – Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba Cloud (for which the GA announcement seems to have slipped completely under the radar at the end of April).
These are based on the VMware Cloud Foundation stack that is (or should be) the default option on-prem too. A reminder that Cloud Foundation is a hyper-converged software solution built on vSphere, vSAN and NSX. This means a true extension of the SDDC from the on-premises data centre to the public cloud, with the additional value-add services they provide.
This common architecture not only provides a familiar platform to manage and consume, but also the ability to easily move virtual machines and applications using HCX, without the need to change the properties of underlying virtual machine and the disruption goes with it.
Following all these announcements, I wanted to get a view of where they were actually available so pulled together the table below. Note that this information is taken from the public websites at the time of writing.
A couple of additional points. Initially, Microsoft offered their VMware solution through a partner (CloudSimple), which was acquired by Google last year. The new Azure VMware Solution is owned, operated and supported by Microsoft.
The IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is available in a dedicated and shared model. I’ve listed the Dedicated version above as this is most comparable to the other services. The Shared version is based on vCloud Director and is only available in North America South (Dallas) with plans to be available in Europe in 2H 2020.
It seems like the VMware multi-cloud landscape is really starting to take shape and there are real and viable options for customers looking for hybridity and the flexibility that brings.
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