Co-authored by: Lokesh Madaan
Cloud adoption has remarkably increased in the last few years. The key factors behind this widespread adoption are the flexibility, agility, scalability, standardization, governance, security, and compliance which cloud offers, apart from commercial benefits like a change from CapEx to OpEx, and faster time to market. HCLTech Cloud Smart strategy focuses on helping customers in their cloud journey, right from the early adoption to different stages of this transition. Our industry-leading and business-centric approach has helped our clients unlock business value, enable innovation, drive cultural change, and enhance user experience.
Many approaches can be used to migrate workloads to the cloud, and each approach has its pros and cons. There is no right or wrong approach to this as the process depends on business objectives and goals. Google Cloud VMware Engine is one of the solutions that enable the cloud adoption journey for many organizations.
Google VMware cloud migration: Why it's worth your consideration
Google Cloud offers a fully managed VMware solution known as Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). GCVE uses a standard VMware stack which consists of VMware vSphere (ESXi, Vcentre), vSAN, and NSX to manage the service. Customers can deploy and migrate VMware workloads natively on Google Cloud in a dedicated model without affecting the business operations. This bulk migration without impacting the existing app stack on GCVE helps customers to adopt the cloud seamlessly. It provides the following key benefits:
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As-a-service model: Organizations no longer want to manage their own IT which comprises infrastructure management, hardware procurement, hardware refresh, software installation, and more. Today, customers aim to focus entirely on their business and look for a model wherein already-built hardware, available data centers, and software could meet their needs quickly. This is where the GCVE solution serves as the right fit. GCVE is a fully managed “VMware as a service” model in which customers host their VMware workloads natively.
- Flawless migration on GCVE: Most organizations use VMware as their primary virtualized layer to host their production workloads. Migrating critical business applications to the cloud involves a risk of environmental change on the target platform, such as application functionalities, IP change, file system changes, and more. To mitigate this risk, customers can bring their VMware vSphere-based workloads to Google Cloud without changing file systems, management, networking services, operating platform and scale their backend infrastructure.
- Preserve existing investment: Many customers have already invested heavily in the VMware stack by enabling their existing skills, defining processes and workloads on VMware. To leverage the same investment, GCVE allows customers to create cloud strategies to minimize the disruption in their existing business and utilize the current infrastructure, available skillsets, and processes to efficiently manage operations across the hybrid cloud environment.
- Swift cloud adoption: Application modernization has always emerged as a complex migration use case for most organizations. This becomes more challenging and time-consuming when the source code is heritage and there is no ownership within the organization. The bespoke application always creates several issues unless it's migrated as-is on an identical platform. GCVE allows migrating as-is application stack without any re-architect of source codebase, which helps customers adopt cloud rapidly.
- Ease of management: Most of the components in GCVE can fully manage the services model. The lifecycle of GCVE covers physical infrastructure, physical security, hardware failure, host patching, NSX, vCentre, and vSAN manageability by the vendor. Customers can quickly deploy applications and easily scale infrastructure when demand for the apps is unpredictable.
Key use cases of GCVE
Datacenter exit: Many customers are about to expire their datacenter contracts and have begun thinking about moving to the cloud. Datacenter exit influences many customers to adopt cloud rapidly. GCVE is the appropriate solution for these scenarios. Customers can migrate their VMware workloads quickly on Google Cloud without any conversion at the application layer by leveraging HCLTech IP OneClick migration , which automates the lifecycle of overall GCVE migration.
Application transformation: Transformation of the application stack has always been a complex and time-consuming process for any organization. It requires humongous efforts depending upon application functionality, criticality, architecture, and many other factors. GCVE allows to migrate those app stacks as-is on Google Cloud and integrate them with GCP-native services.
Disaster recovery: Another heavy investment that customers make in IT is for building a disaster recovery site. Customers need to have a disaster recovery site with a separate data center infrastructure and operational workloads that increase the overall TCO. GCVE can be leveraged as a ‘disaster recovery site’ for virtualized workloads for customers’ existing data centers and enable usage when actual DR triggers.
Virtual desktop: COVID-19 and associated acceleration of remote workforce measures stress customers’ data center infrastructure in different ways:
- Some applications such as VDI encounter more load than initially anticipated
- Scheduled datacenter capacity extensions are delayed, which may affect planned workloads
- Business continuity plans and notably disaster recovery plans affected customers’ ability to execute on them
Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a solution to solve these issues, as it offers a straightforward expansion of data center VMware environments into the cloud. The capacity expansion issue is also solved with VMware on Google cloud. GCVE offers agile scaling capability in Google to host VMware-based workloads.
HCLTech is a certified MSP Partner for both Google Cloud and VMware. We have all the experience and expertise required to augment your cloud journey. This substantiates our strength and capability in delivering managed services for Google Cloud VMware solution that is helping our customers embark on their cloud adoption journey.
