For VMware Admins: Why Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Should Be on Your Radar

Reduce Risk by Migrating Your VMware Workloads to Google Cloud with Ease

Allan Alfonso

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

5 min readAug 12, 2024

VMware is increasing their prices while Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is lowering theirs.

VMware customers must switch to a new subscription model once their existing perpetual license agreement ends and informal reports suggest the new model is more expensive. Also, Broadcom terminated agreements with VMware partners and outsourced support so some customers might need to find a new partner or deal with lower quality support. Many things that I’ve read suggest that VMware’s changes are universally unpopular but however you and I may feel about their decisions, this is the new reality.

What to do?

There are 3 Options to Address the Changes in VMware Licensing

Migrate your VMware Environment to Google Cloud GCVE

Do Nothing and accept the price increases.
Lift and Shift or Modernization applications into the cloud.
Migrate your VMware environment into Google Cloud using GCVE.

Options 1 and 2 can be expensive or take time and effort that many people don’t have.

As a compromise, companies can migrate their VMware environment to the cloud and then decide how they want to address options 1 and 2.

There are 3 Reasons Why People are Considering Migrating to GCVE

Price Stability: People are concerned about the increase in price. From what I see on the reddits and message boards, VMware customers are seeing anywhere between a 3x — 10X price increase so they are looking for ways to reduce the risk of price instability.
Workload Modernization: Once you’ve migrated to Google Cloud, now you have time to modernize your workloads and move away from VMware. To help with modernization, Google recently announced “Convertable Commitments” that allows you to convert part of your commitment to Google Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine.
Transformation over Time: Once you’ve migrated your workloads, consider taking advantage of other Google service such as AI to transform your workloads.

There are 3 Popular Use Cases for GCVE

GCVE is a Managed VMware Service with the Look and Feel of Your On-Prem Environment

Price Protection: GCVE has an option which includes VMware licenses so you can lock in costs for up to 3 years. Google recently announced a 20% price reduction for commitment pricing based on previous pricing. There is also a discount on GCVE nodes if you choose to port your VCF licenses to GCVE.
Disaster Recovery and Backups: Another use case I see is using GCVE for backup and recovery. We keep hearing more outages in the news and who knows what might cause the next outage. GCVE fits well into a DR plan because you can take advantage of the elastic nature of the cloud and quickly spin up a DR environment to keep critical applications running.
Managed Service: Maybe a lease is expiring or you’re due for a hardware refresh. Rather than continue maintaining an on-prem environment, you can migrate to GCVE. It operates just like you’re on-prem environment except there is no hardware to manage.

Google and Broadcom have a Unique Relationship

Unknown to most, Google is one of Broadcom’s biggest customers.

Google and Broadcom co-developed the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which are the computer chips that power much of Google’s AI technology. Broadcom supplies the TPU and Google is Broadcom’s primary customer for TPUs. Also, Broadcom supplies computer chips for Google phones, data centers, and cloud services. In return, Broadcom is a Google Cloud customer. Google Cloud was the first Cloud to receive license portability and continues to receives benefits first.

While I cannot confirm, the relationship suggests that Broadcom will favor GCVE as long as the Broadcom and Google relationship remains symbiotic.

Conclusion: GCVE is about Reducing Risk, Not Price

The compelling reason to move to GCVE is to reduce risk, not cost.

Calculate a total cost of ownership over 3 years for your on-prem environment and GCVE. I expect you will see a lower toal cost of ownership with GCVE but the savings might not be as large as you think… and the savings will vary depending on how you model the variables and what discounts Google offers at that time. If you calculate significant savings, then the business case supports switching. If you don’t calculate significant cost savings, GCVE still offers value because it reduces risk.

With GCVE, you can stabilize your costs for up to 3 years and reduce your risk of any future price changes.

To further reduce risk, Google recently announced “Convertible Commitments” where you can convert part of your commitment to Compute Engine and Kubernetes. You can take advantage of price stability by migrating to GCVE today while getting the flexibility to migrate VMs off VMware without additional cost tomorrow. In my opinion, this is most exciting of the recent announcements.

Spin up a GCVE cluster today and test the benefits.