Original reporting sourced from cloudcomputing-news.net, published August 2019.
VMware and Google Cloud Deepen Their Partnership
VMware and Google Cloud announced an expanded partnership in mid-2019 with the launch of Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple. CloudSimple is a verified VMware cloud provider partner. The offering allows enterprises to run their existing VMware workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — either fully in the cloud, on-premises, or as part of a hybrid architecture — without needing to re-architect or retool their VMware environments.
What the Solution Offers
The core value proposition is continuity: organisations already invested in VMware tooling, training, and operational practices can extend those workloads into GCP without abandoning their existing infrastructure investments. Key capabilities highlighted at launch included:
- VMware vSphere-based workload portability — run vSphere VMs natively in GCP dedicated bare-metal nodes managed by CloudSimple.
- Hybrid deployment flexibility — workloads can span on-premises data centres and GCP, with consistent tooling across both.
- Anthos integration — organisations can also modernise towards containerised applications using Google’s Anthos platform alongside traditional VM-based workloads in the same environment.
VMware COO Sanjay Poonen framed the deal in terms of investment protection: “With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all of the familiarity and investment protection of VMware tools and training as they execute on their cloud strategies, and rapidly bring new services to market and operate them seamlessly and more securely across a hybrid cloud environment.”
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian confirmed the launch via a blog post, stating: “Customers have asked us to provide broad support for VMware, and now with Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, our customers will be able to run VMware vSphere-based workloads in GCP. This brings customers a wide breadth of choices for how to run their VMware workloads in a hybrid deployment, from modern containerised applications with Anthos to VM-based applications with VMware in GCP.”
VMware’s Multi-Cloud Strategy: Supporting All Five Major Hyperscalers
The Google Cloud deal completed VMware’s coverage of what Poonen described as the five largest public clouds: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud. This positions VMware as a genuinely cloud-agnostic infrastructure layer — a crucial differentiator in an era of enterprise multi-cloud adoption.
VMware’s most high-profile hyperscaler deal remains its partnership with AWS. The launch of AWS Outposts in late 2018 was a landmark moment at AWS re:Invent, where VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger shared the stage with AWS leadership. Outposts brings AWS infrastructure on-premises, with an option to run VMware Cloud on AWS — delivering what both companies described as a “truly consistent hybrid experience.”
Why VMware’s Hybrid Positioning Makes Strategic Sense
VMware’s pivot to becoming a hybrid and multi-cloud enabler rather than a standalone on-premises virtualisation vendor has been years in the making. The company’s heritage is deeply rooted in enterprise virtualisation — a position that could have become a liability as public cloud adoption accelerated through the 2010s.
Several technology companies — including telcos such as CenturyLink and Verizon — attempted to build competing public cloud platforms and ultimately retreated. VMware read the market differently, identifying two durable enterprise trends:
- Enterprises would adopt multiple public cloud providers, not consolidate onto a single vendor — making a cloud-neutral infrastructure layer valuable rather than redundant.
- On-premises infrastructure was not going away — regulated industries, latency-sensitive workloads, and data sovereignty requirements mean a substantial portion of enterprise compute will remain on-prem or in private data centres for the foreseeable future.
This dual reality — multi-cloud adoption combined with persistent on-premises investment — is precisely the gap VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy is designed to fill. By building certified partnerships with every major hyperscaler, VMware can serve as the consistent operational and management layer regardless of where workloads actually run.
Anthos: Google’s Broader Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Play
The mention of Anthos in the VMware-Google announcement is significant context. Anthos is Google Cloud’s managed application platform built on Kubernetes, designed to let organisations deploy and manage containerised workloads consistently across on-premises infrastructure, GCP, and other clouds. By pairing Anthos with the VMware Solution by CloudSimple, Google is offering enterprises a migration path — traditional VM-based VMware workloads can run in GCP today, while teams modernise towards containers on Anthos over time.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams
- Organisations heavily invested in VMware (vSphere, vCenter, NSX, vSAN) can now extend those environments to GCP without re-platforming.
- The CloudSimple partnership provides dedicated, bare-metal GCP nodes — workloads are not running on shared or virtualised GCP infrastructure.
- VMware’s strategy of partnering with all major hyperscalers reduces lock-in risk for enterprises and preserves operational consistency across clouds.
- Teams evaluating hybrid cloud architectures in 2019 and beyond should assess whether a VMware-on-cloud model provides a lower-friction migration path than a full lift-and-shift or re-architecture to cloud-native services.
This article is based on reporting from cloudcomputing-news.net and public statements made at the time of the August 2019 announcement.