New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

With 99.99% availability for a cluster in a single zone, fully dedicated 100 Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription, and all nonvolatile memory express storage, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides the highest performance required for the most demanding workloads. Let us look at what’s new:

Preview – Google Cloud KMS integration: You already have the ability to bring your own keys to encrypt your vSAN datastores. With this new capability, organizations that want to eliminate the overhead of managing external key providers can leverage a Google managed key provider, using Cloud KMS. This brings increased flexibility in securing workloads and data by enabling vSAN encryption by default for newly instantiated VMware Private Clouds. This feature is currently in Preview.

HIPAA compliance: Since April, Google Cloud VMware Engine is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. This opens the service up to healthcare organizations, that can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications. Read more in this blog.

NSX-T support for Active Directory: With NSX-T support for Active Directory, you can now leverage your on-premises Active Directory as one of the lightweight directory access protocol identity sources for user authentication into NSX-T manager. This extends the theme of being able to leverage your on-premises tools with Google Cloud VMware Engine. For more information, read the documentation on how to set up identity sources.

vSAN TRIM/UNMAP support: For space-efficiency, vSAN allows creating thin-provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data. However, files that are deleted within the guest operating system (OS) do not result in vSAN freeing up space allocated. To increase space efficiency, guest OS file systems have the ability to reclaim capacity that is no longer used, using TRIM/UNMAP commands. vSAN is fully aware of these commands that are sent from the guest OS and enables reclamation of previously allocated storage as free space. We have enabled TRIM/UNMAP for vSan by default in Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Simplicity in experience and operations

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you only need to worry about your workloads–not patching, upgrading, and updating the solution layer, for fewer interoperability issues and infrastructure maintenance. IIn addition, we have pre-built service accounts to enable your third-party VMware-supported tools and solutions to work seamlessly in VMware Engine. Access to Google services privately over local connections is also natively supported, enabling enrichment of existing applications and modernization over time. Finally, this service brings the power of Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) design by natively providing multi-VPC, multi-region networking that’s unique. Let’s look at what’s new:

Dashboards for Day 2 operations: To speed up cloud transformation and enable efficiency, Google Cloud VMware Engine administrators can take advantage of Cloud Operations dashboards for the solution. In addition, administrators can create custom policies through cloud alerting and enable notifications via channels of their choice (SMS, email, Slack, and more). For more details on how to set up cloud monitoring, please refer to Setting up Cloud Monitoring.

For the latest updates, bookmark Google Cloud VMware Engine release notes.

^{Thanks to Manish Lohani, Product Management, Google Cloud; Nargis Sakhibova, Product Management, Google Cloud; and Wade Holmes, Solutions Management, Google Cloud; for their contributions to this blog post.}