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Google is now offering support for the VMware EXSi hypervisor for its Google Cloud Engine.

According to the announcement by Google Cloud on its Open Source blog, end users can now choose the VMware ESXi hypervisor for running the Google Cloud Engine. The latter solution could previously only run on the Google’s own KVM hypervisor.

Google Cloud VMware Engine

More specifically, Google Cloud calls its support for the VMware hypervisor “Google Cloud VMware Engine. Supporting the EXSi hypervisor also means supporting various tools from other third-party vendors. These include solutions and applications from Veeam, Cohesity and NetApp.

How the service works is not really clear yet, writes The Register. The website also wonders in this regard whether bare-metal ESXi instances are also supported or whether VMware is run under so-called nested virtualization. The latter should be possible.

The new Google Cloud VMware Engine additionally supports automated infrastructure management based on Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaC) from, for example, Terraform from Hashicorp.

ChromeOS supports Microsoft 365

In addition to Google’s now-announced notable support for VMware, the tech giant also announced that its own ChromeOS will soon support Microsoft 365 directly. This does not involve versions of Microsoft’s productivity suite installed locally on Chromebooks, but rather support for the Progressive Web App version of tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. These are available through office.com.

Read more: Microsoft 365 is about to work much better on ChromeOS