VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is now generally available. The solution makes it cheaper and easier to move on-prem licenses to the public cloud. Discounts can be as high as 40 percent.
License portability, or moving licenses from on-prem locations to the public cloud, offers users flexibility. In a hybrid cloud approach, this avoids duplicate costs or locking into a particular type of IT infrastructure. In February, Broadcom and Google Cloud announced license portability for joint customers. An on-prem VMware Cloud Foundation license can be used flexibly within Google Cloud VMware Engine.
Large discounts
Google Cloud emphasizes the benefits of VCF-on-GCVE. Today’s announcement focuses on discounted pricing for customers. Those who commit to a subscription will pay about 20 percent less. Organizations that pay in advance to rent a server for three years will receive a 35 percent discount. These include new server instances for VMware workloads, which offer 96 or 128 hyperthreads as compute nodes.
Although Google Cloud’s announcement focuses on its partnership with Broadcom, it also notes that migrated VMware environments can be supplemented with conventional cloud workloads. So for VMware customers, there is the opportunity to gradually move away from virtualization.
Many alternatives
For VMware customers, there are many low-cost alternatives to on-prem VMs anyway. For example, Ahold Delhaize is choosing the Oracle VMware Solution to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
A similar offering to Google’s is VMware Cloud on AWS, which is running a promotion this year on migrating VMs. Those who migrate 80 or more VMs get 400 dollars in credits per VM. At Microsoft, customers also have the option to migrate inexpensively. Microsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff stated that the substantial changes under Broadcom provide ‘the biggest gift ever’ for VMware alternatives.
Also read: Microsoft is also scrambling to acquire VMware customers