TEC37 E05: Enabling Hybrid Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine

Please view transcript below:

Robb Boyd:  Welcome to the TEC37 podcast, your source for technology, education and collaboration from World Wide Technology, and for today also Google Cloud. My name is Robb Boyd.

On today's rundown: we have Google Cloud and VMware Engine. So VMware centric customers now have easier options for moving to hybrid cloud. It's VMware software defined data centers, which can now extend their workloads natively within Google Cloud, and this is all thanks to Google's acquisition of Cloud Simple, which happened back in 2019. But thanks to ... and why it's pertinent for today ... it's now a part of a service called Google Cloud VMware engine. Did I get that straight? So ostensibly, now this kind of thing should be much easier, right? So that's what we're going to discuss.

World Wide Technology has been deeply engaged with both Google and VMware as they are normally, and they're well positioned to have served as a testing site for everything that's being developed and understanding the use cases that we're going to go into next to make sure we understand what it could do for you.

All right. We have two special guests with us today from World Wide Technology. First of all, Sean Hicks, Sean, and you can tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sean Hicks: Yes, sir. So Sean Hicks, I'm a Technical Solutions Architect with our Global Engineering team and I'm focused on hybrid cloud platforms.

Robb Boyd: All right, perfect. Perfect. And also Joe Pitkin, Joe, tell us about yourself.

Joe Pitkin: Yeah. Thanks, Robb, Joe Pitkin. I am a Multi-cloud Platform Architect here at WWT, primarily focused on the Google Cloud computing side of things, working with Sean on the hybrid cloud offerings for Google Cloud.

Robb Boyd: Perfect. Okay, well, you guys are obviously good candidates for the topic today, as we talk about what Google Cloud ... If I can get that out of my throat there ... what Google Cloud is doing with VMware and why this is of particular value to VMware customers, at least of a particular set. I want to just make sure we understand all the nuances here because you guys have been working as I understand it with both Google Cloud and VMware, as you usually do around a number of different things, but let's explain what's going on here, starting with the partnership.

Sean, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the partnership where WWT fits and kind of what you guys have been doing together?

Sean Hicks: Sure, so World Wide, obviously our background is really in the historical data center where VMware is king. 100% of Fortune 500 companies run VMware and our partnership with VMware is deep, involves a lot of investment. And we have a lot of expertise built around their portfolio, everything from cloud platform management on down the stack to historical products, like a vSphere and networking products like NSX and so on and so forth. We're taking that into the cloud because that's where VMware wants to go. VMware really sees a future of their ecosystem existing everywhere, whether that's in the public cloud, private cloud or some kind of a hosted offering somewhere, maybe even just co-location facilities.

And so following up to that though, we also have a great extensive partnership with Google Cloud. And so marrying these two things is allowing us to accomplish quite a bit for our customers in terms of rapidly accelerating cloud migrations, in terms of helping them out with decisions around disaster recovery, extending workloads into the cloud, and also helping them with the modernization of their applications, more towards microservices and cloud native services.

Robb Boyd: Okay. Okay. So if you were to say, identify who is most ripe for the solution that's been announced, Joe, let me come to you. Tell me specifically, what's been announced so far, what's the status of it as of today, and what kind of customers ... I guess, is it a subset of VMware customers looking to go to cloud? How would you describe what the opportunity is here?

Joe Pitkin: Well, that's a great question, Robb. So a while back Google Cloud acquired a company, Cloud Simple, who had a third party solution for VMware as a service running on top of Google Cloud. And what they've done is actually made that a first party solution. So Google is the single source for all things VMware on Google Cloud. The product today is in a early release program that WWT is part of. So we've been able to work through proof of concepts, validate some of those use cases that Sean listed in preparation for the generally available release at the end of June, June 30th, to be exact. And really what we'll be looking to do is target customers that do have VMware workloads, as Sean mentioned as their primary footprint within their on premise data center, but are looking to start consuming public cloud ina variety of different manners, whether that's through a disaster recovery solution or integrating with cloud native services. We're creating a bridge for customers to get those workloads over to the public cloud in this case, Google Cloud platform.

Robb Boyd: Okay, well, feel free to restate this, if I don't say it exactly correctly, but one of the things I love about WWT is that you guys are multi-vendor, you guys are very, very solutions, customer focused, and you really are agnostic when it comes to how people are going to do things, and you work with the top vendors like these two here.

So you guys worked on the use cases that would be most valuable for various customers. You both have mentioned a few of them here, but I wonder if we could go through them just logically a little bit, talk about what you guys have done, and feel free to throw in the fact ... because as I was poking around the platform or your website, I guess it's both saying the same thing there, but basically wwt.com. Correct?

Sean Hicks: That's right.

Robb Boyd: When you look at the resources you guys have available, you have everything from workshops to labs that could be done remotely around this subject and some of which may be within some of these use cases. But, yeah, either one of you, the first use case that I had noted was this, was probably the primary thing that we're speaking to, right? Which is a notion of hybrid cloud and data center expansion. So really going, making it easier to go from on prem only with these VMware workloads and starting to take advantage of cloud, I guess, is what we're really talking about here, but could one of you comment on what is this specific use case and how would you, what kind of stuff has been learned and shared?

Sean Hicks: Sure. I'll take that one, Robb. So a lot of the reasons why customers are wanting to move to public cloud is because of the consumption model, right? It's the elasticity, the agility to just be able to spin up infrastructure and go. Essentially the public cloud providers have accomplished that on demand IT aspect that we've all longed for and sought after in our own environments, but have sort of struggled with. And so now we're extending that into VMware to where customers can continue to have their VMware based workloads. But historically, those VMware based workloads were a little difficult to get into public cloud because public cloud providers don't typically use VMware, the covers for their services. And by doing this, offering VMware as a service, essentially we are enabling true hybrid cloud, which is defined as having some technology that can actually connect to disparate cloud environments so that you have application data portability between them.

And so with this offering, we're going to be able to offer that to our customers in order to help them continue to consume Google Cloud while supporting their native VMware workloads, moving more towards OPEX models instead of CAPEX models, moving more towards, on demand IT and having that sort of elasticity to grow their infrastructure as needed.

So let's say that you are the tax company and the only additional infrastructure during tax season or maybe you're a retailer and you only need that additional infrastructure during Black Friday or Cyber Monday or some other retail event, or maybe you're running dev test and you want to be able to spin up an infrastructure for your intelligence workers, the ones that are actually coming up with the new ideas and new software for your users to have an area where they can go play, that's not necessarily a sum cost that you didn't have to live with and lifecycle manage.

Those are all nice things about public cloud that Google Cloud VMware engine is bringing to the VMware conversation.

Robb Boyd: Go ahead, Joe.

Joe Pitkin: Yeah, and, no, to add to some of that too, you know one of the benefits is the customer consuming this offering can utilize existing tools that they're comfortable with on premise. So the same vCenter administrative interface, if they're expanding on that with some of the vRealize portfolio operations manager, things like that, that stays in place. So there, it limits the learning curve associated with consuming public cloud, and it allows customers to revisit some of the longterm goals associated with refactoring applications, while still being able to put workloads in a public cloud environment that allows for some of that elasticity and scale that Sean had mentioned there.

Robb Boyd: Well, that's probably the thing I'm most curious about here is a lot of the things mentioned there ... Some specifics in here that I really want to drill into, which is around the fact that just going to cloud and moving to cloud can ... It's a challenging notion for many enterprise and the idea behind not only the partnership, but this is a service, correct, that Google's providing, so ostensibly they're making it easier to make this kind of change? Can you speak a little bit more to the things that are different, than just going to the cloud and maybe the benefits in this particular incarnation of doing it where it's beneficial, maybe for certain customers, you know, VMware customers obviously, but how has it over and above just doing cloud in general? What are the things that you'd highlight as unique?

Sean Hicks: Sure. So customers already have their skillsets, they've already invested in technology professionals who understand the VMware ecosystem. They also have sunk cost and tools, tools that are quite critical, actually, think about disaster recovery. A lot of customers rely on VMware site recovery manager for that, and they can bring that with them when they go into Google Cloud VM-ware engine. In fact, that's part of one of the use cases actually is to use site recovery manager to enable essentially disaster recovery as a service using GCVE or the opposite. Maybe you're going to actually disaster recovery by pulling back on program. We've actually seen some customers do that, but SRM is a tool that customers are already familiar with and bringing with them. And we see that extensively across the board that it's really about not needing new skillset. It's not needing new tools to be able to go ahead and start lifting and shifting workloads to gain some of those good things about public cloud that customers want, while not leaving behind all of their already existing investments and skillsets in the VMware ecosystem.

Robb Boyd: Yeah. I'm curious, and I don't know this question for either of you, does there, is there a significant change? I always think when it, when it comes to, you know, workloads being in different places and things like that, everything from manageability to visibility and how those work hand in hand as also just ... in existing workflows, it feels like there's a benefit here with the fact that exist ... when you mentioned, Sean, that the language is used the same, the tool sets are similar. It sounds like less of a culture shock to be able to start doing these kinds of things based on what they've, what they're offering here. Would, you agree? Either one of you.

Sean Hicks: Yeah, absolutely. The operations model does not change here. The only thing that changes is that you're no longer responsible for a lot of, you know, what we really consider it to be lower level tasks that there's not a lot of value in. For instance, racking a server into a cabinet or cabling it up, or physical networking, hardware, lifecycle management, even the software life cycle management, things like patching vCenter or patching vSphere. All of that is handled for you as part of the service. Your job really is to architect the environment and fill it with applications.

And so it'll really allow customers to accelerate their transformation and keep themselves focused on the tasks that bring real value, the tasks that they actually went out and hired very smart IT people to be able to handle.

Joe Pitkin: Yeah, so to kind of give a scenario there, as Sean mentioned, the maintenance associated with the underlying VMware infrastructure, you know, if there's an urgent ESXi patch that needs to be released and you have to update a hundred hosts or more, that's a pretty time consuming task, and also you have to plan around maintenance windows, approvals, and things of that nature. By offloading that to Google Cloud, you now have significant time to determine what the right refactoring strategy is for an application, if that's the goal. So you can then consider, okay, we have our workloads running in a hosted VMware environment on top of Google Cloud, is this really what we want for the long term use of this application or would it make more sense to maybe break it out into microservices and lean into more of a containerization strategy?

And with that time back that it's not dedicated towards administrating or maintaining the underlying VMware infrastructure, you can really make sure that the initiatives are, or teeing a organization up for longterm success associated with those objectives.

Robb Boyd: Got you.

Sean Hicks: And to your point, Robb, the operations model does not change.

Robb Boyd: That's huge.

Sean Hicks: So the biggest part about losing all of those low level tasks that don't really bring value is that your people are going to be able to focus on things like capacity planning for instance, but they're not going to have to change the tools that they're already using to do that. They're going to be able to continue to use things like vRealize operations and vRealize log insight, vRealize network insight to be able to assist in the operational model that they need to make sure that, you know, they're avoiding things like noisy neighbors, or they understand their application dependencies. They can bring all that with them into Google Cloud VMware engine.

Robb Boyd: So it's really removing a lot of friction, it feels like, in terms of ... and really the fear that can come along with doing these things, by making, helping them live more in the land of the familiar. And just to be fair, so I started this off talking about some use cases, and then we're getting into the details, because the very first one actually is pretty broad applicability to the entire solution. But these use cases, and we need to put a link in the show notes to make sure everybody can get to this, but Joe, you wrote a really nice paper or paper ... a blog entry, I guess it is, but you did a good blog, and that's where I stole these use cases from, straight from yours.

So I'm going to hit you with the second one then, because at first, when hybrid cloud and data center expansion, that makes a lot of sense. You guys have both reflected on that quite well. And then Sean had also mentioned already, but let's go into a little bit further as necessarily backup and disaster recovery. Do you mind recapping, Joe, what's ... is that when you talk about backup and disaster recovery, as a use case in this solution is that mean it's distinct? In other words, you could actually take that on without maybe taking on some other things, if that was of a particular urgent value?

Joe Pitkin: Yeah, sure thing. So you can definitely do that in an isolated fashion as you just described, but really what it allows is rather than having to have the upfront investment costs associated with a dedicated fail oversight, you can design the Google Cloud VMware engine, private cloud, or a hosted instance rather to be kind of a cold site for fail over. And the nice thing that Google Cloud has done is not only validated, you know, the VMware site recovery manager solutions that Sean was speaking to, but they've also gone and validated some of the beams or tow and other third party tools. And they provide administrative access for those plugins into vCenter. So as a customer, you maintain the level of control going back to what Sean was saying so that you can tailor the solution specific to your needs.

Robb Boyd: Okay.

Sean Hicks: Yeah, we're doing all of that on top of Google data centers, right? So when you think about disaster recovery, the need for reliability, it's fair. You know, Google is way better at running data centers than most of our customers are. It's not a knock on our customers.

Robb Boyd: No.

Sean Hicks: It's just it's their primary business. You always hear customers saying that they're trying to get out of the data center business because it's not their business, and it doesn't bring value except that that's where applications have to live.

Robb Boyd: Okay, there's something with that data.

Sean Hicks: And so riding on top of Google's global infrastructure and global data centers is great from a reliability aspect to make sure that those resources are always there and available.

Robb Boyd: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.

Sean Hicks: Yeah, to that point, to the consumption model makes more sense in a fail over scenario, where rather than having 50 servers waiting for fail over, they're there on demand as a fail over event is triggered. So it reduces some of the costs associated with that as well.

Yeah. So you basically maintain a like small number of servers, just the minimum required to have a production environment in Google Cloud VMware engine. And then in case of a recovery event, you would expand that in an automated fashion and adding nodes to the cluster takes us less than 20 minutes. So you can scale your cluster pretty much on demand to absorb your workload in a disaster event.

Robb Boyd: And this is really what we're talking about, the advantages of cloud, which is we want to take advantage of the cloud at the same time. We don't want to put anything more at risk than we're already doing. And so for customers who are like, "Hey, we're getting along pretty well. Why would I take on a cloud unless there's some better benefit or some gain that we're going to get out of it?" And everything you're mentioning sounds like a positive for getting there. And so it just becomes now, how do we, how do we get over that first hurdle, which is actually starting to use it.

Now, another thing that kind of has come up here where we talk about containers, talk about microservices and things like this is the third use case that was mentioned in your article, Joe, was around application modernization. And some of the things that you guys are talking about do require some modernization that has happened. So how is it that this solution is helping perhaps a move to a more modern approach?

Joe Pitkin: Yeah, so when we're talking application modernization, we're really saying, going beyond the initial capabilities of an application with the data associated with that workload. So let's say you have a legacy healthcare database that is really critical to your business, and there's a high risk with refactoring that rather than having to maybe rearchitect it to run natively on Google Compute engine, what we can do is present that application data to cloud native services with that workload now running within GCVE. So for example, if you needed to take that data and present it to a analytics engine, the way that the backend networking is inherently established within Google Cloud, we could present that securely to run analytics across that database and provide business insights back to a customer. So, you know, analytics is a big piece when you're talking cloud, especially with Google's offerings, but you can also do things with cloud storage for rapid scale of backend storage objects. You could get into machine learning if needed. So Stackdriver monitoring, log in, things like that, the list goes on.

Robb Boyd: Yeah, once you start taking advantage of one Google service in this case ... and you said GCVE, which is for anybody that hasn't picked up on the acronym already, and hopefully we would have at this point, but that's the, well, Google Cloud VMware engine. I get it right?

Joe Pitkin: Correct.

Sean Hicks: That's right.

Robb Boyd: Okay, I have to practice my acronyms quite a bit as well. So this last use case is of interest to me because in this, this time of the pandemic and such, I've actually seen a number of companies who are already working in this direction in terms of virtual desktops, where suddenly working from home was pretty much a non event for many of them. And I even had one customer go out of their way and he didn't tell me till late in the conversation. And we were connecting similar to we're ... as you guys was, we're doing it now, although it wasn't being recorded, unfortunately, but he was, he suddenly told me that he had purposefully connected to the call using a really old slow machine because he specifically wanted to highlight how there was less, the issue of machine power on the end point was less important when it came to being a virtual desktop in terms of how these technologies work.

And so your fourth use case in your article was cloud based virtual desktops. This sounds like a good thing. And it sounds like something more people should be doing. We're always struggling to control the amount of information that's sitting out at the end points and how we can, how we can engage employees faster, get them onboarded more quickly, securely control what's happening and where it goes. Am I saying all the right things in terms of what we are beginning in this?

Sean Hicks: No, you absolutely are. Yes.

Robb Boyd: Okay.

Sean Hicks: And so, I mean, we do typically toss that in the bucket of hybrid cloud extension, because usually what a customer is doing is they're extending an existing VDI footprint into public cloud. But what we saw with the recent pandemic was really just insane. A lot of interest around VDI and public cloud, because of things like losing the global logistics supply chain, suddenly people needed more servers to be able to expand their end user compute environment, but they couldn't get them. And the little bit of technology that was trickling across the Pacific from places like Taiwan and China and others was essentially hitting triage lists, you know. Some might [inaudible] you know, with the little bit, that's actually making it across the ocean, we are trying to service the customers who are directly combating the virus first. So, you know, gene sequencers and healthcare companies are getting shot right to the top of the list, but that leaves a lot of us, some very big, some very important customers, really struggling to acquire infrastructure.

And, you know, at that time and they'll look to the public cloud and say, "Well, well, they've got all this infrastructure and it's there virtually for me to go and consume. Not only that, but also we don't know how long these workforces are going to be remote. We suspect that some of them may eventually go back to regular office work, and in that case, do we even need to invest in permanent infrastructure? Or do we want something that we can scale back later on?

So that exact same elasticity also works in the opposite direction for those remote workforces that are newly remote and may not be within the future. So serious customer demand around end user compute, whether that's virtual desktop infrastructure or application virtualization for the public cloud. And a lot of them are having a great experience with it because it turns out that by putting these virtualized applications or these VDI sessions in the public cloud, you're taking advantage of global public cloud infrastructure, specifically with Google, you know, you've got best in class fiber backbone. You've got, you know, best in class hardware under the hood.

These data centers are, they're serious, serious data centers, right? They're they're of a class and not like most, you know, companies would have for private cloud. And by taking advantage of that footprint, the users are actually having a better experience because they're from a network comp perspective public cloud. They're much closer to that from home than they are typically to a private cloud environment, which is wherever the corporate headquarters happens to be, or in some city that they've decided to use a colocation facility. So we're seeing, those who've gone this route are not only happy with it, but really sort of seeing some additional benefits that they hadn't originally anticipate.

Robb Boyd: Yeah, Joe, it feels like people have maybe been forced into doing things much faster than they wanted to. Those that had already done this kind of thing were perhaps better prepared and others are learning quickly, but it sounds like ... would you agree that these are still good things to consider for moving into now, because if there was any bit of proof point that we need more flexibility and agility here, this would be it. Yes?

Joe Pitkin: Yeah. I think to your point, Robb, this as a whole really provides an opportunity for organizations to pivot, and you're not overly committed to a model that may be obsolete or may not suit needs that have yet emerged longterm. So really the underlying theme here is flexibility and that's what we're trying to emphasize in conversations with our customers.

Robb Boyd: Well, today's episode is sponsored by Google, and I certainly appreciate their sponsorship of this, you know, in addition to World Wide Technology. But the point is that you guys do represent multiple cloud providers and ... but I've actually worked with a number of different people on your teams in various aspects of Google services. It really feels like Google is making a lot of good moves to carve out a unique niche. But just to make sure that I understand is if a customer in this VMware solution, they've already made a commitment to VMware, if they are additionally picking up additional commitments to Google Cloud, I still get the feeling they're not locked in.

Is that, is that what you're saying? There's not a lock in, in terms of saying, "Well, once you do this, you're going to be in that Google Cloud." It feels like Google's done a bit differently than maybe some other cloud providers in terms of giving people more freedom to move into the services that they need, but not handcuffing them and saying, you know, "This is, this is going to be it for your future," because these things are based on a pretty open say containerization and other things that are, that are fairly fluid. Yes?

Sean Hicks: When you looked at Google Cloud's architecture across the board, I mean, they're champions of a lot of open source projects. They are really the brain trust that gave us Kubernetes and a lot of their service offerings are really targeted. You know, they're not just coming up with a whole bunch of services, sort of, I wouldn't say willy nilly but, it's not "A build it and they will come." It's more like, "Hey, we found a use for this, and we think the rest of the world could too. So you see them focusing in areas like analytics, like AI and machine learning. You see them focusing in areas like content delivery networks, things of this nature where they really are sort of carving out a niche for themselves.

And let's not fool ourselves here, I mean we like Google, but we also realize that they are not the number one market share holder in this space at the moment. And you know, so they're working really hard to sort of make up lost ground, right? They weren't the first to market with a cloud solution, but they are very rapidly becoming at least one of my favorite cloud providers. Yeah.

Robb Boyd: I feel like this competition is good for all of us because it just drives additional services. It pushes all of us to figure out how to do things better, faster, easier, cheaper, whatever it may be and I think collectively keeps us on our toes. So yeah, I agree with your, your outlook on that, but I think it's a good thing.

So a couple of general questions, just to make sure before we wrap things up and try to keep to our TEC37 promise of around 37 minutes in terms of, we've talked about the additional cloud benefits that Google offers, we've talked about, reducing friction in terms of what this really means for VMware customers specifically. How will separate cloud environments be managed? What is the kind of the what I always call the dashboard, look for somebody who's used to doing this kind of stuff on prem? Now you've got workloads spread out further. How can you reduce the tension of someone feeling like, "Ah, that feels like I'm losing control?" What's the visibility when this kind of solution's being used?

Joe Pitkin: Yeah. So from a peer Google Cloud VMware engine standpoint, the operational tools are going to stay the same. So the VMware piece will still be managed through vCenter. Anybody looking to do network virtualization will still go into their NSX-T interface, and the Google Cloud piece is still access through Google Cloud Council, which hopefully a customer consuming us does have some familiarity with the Google Cloud console. When we're talking multi-cloud as a whole, Robb, which might be another 37 minutes, I know that Sean and I have been working with the larger team to really identify what the strategy looks like for the customers as multiple tools get put into place, and sometimes the same tools overlapping on different cloud environments, but being utilized different ways. So how do we flesh that out and make it, you know, more feasible for customers to manage multiple cloud end points?

Robb Boyd: Well, you bring up something ... Yeah, oh, go, sorry.

Sean Hicks: Oh, sorry.

Robb Boyd: Go ahead. No, no.

Sean Hicks: No, I was going to add that, I think let's also consider, you know, the strength of the solution and who it's for, right? So when I hear someone saying, "I feel like I'm losing control." What is it that you're trying to control? If that control is really around the physical infrastructure that your environment lives on top of, then let's consider whether or not this is the right solution for you. You know, it's always an answer as we are a multi-vendor partner, and we try to represent all of the options to the customer equally. Maybe this isn't the right solution for that particular customer, but I have to ask questions like, "Are you the sort of IT department that can roll out thousands of virtualized hosts around the globe without any config drift at all and in an automated fashion?"

If that's you, then this probably isn't the right solution. You're clearly, you know, as good at running a VMware private cloud infrastructure as any [inaudible] but I think there's a lot of customers out there that, you know, when they start digging under the covers and they figure out pretty quickly, you know, even with the best intentions and the best people, we've made it harder for ourselves to automate. We've made ourselves focused on the wrong tasks and keeping busy with things that don't bring value to the business, and I think that's where the solution really shines.

Robb Boyd: That is such an interesting point because of the fact that it's like ... and hopefully I'm interpreting this correctly ... but part of what I feel like you were saying in there that at least hit me between the eyes was "Do you have your own house in order of which to ..." because you are talking about an expansion of the business in terms of how things are done. That's nothing to sneeze at. As simple as this can be made, it's not a just a simple, "Yeah, we were thinking about doing that this afternoon."

And so to that point in terms of knowing if you're ready and then knowing where to start, let's say, you know, I would assume any decent sized customer has so many different opportunities for would it be various workloads? Some things are more important than others. Some things are more risky than others. Joe, tell me a little bit about, as we wind things up here, services and support that WWT offers? How much does a customer need to know to come to you and say, "I need help, man. This sounds like it's an interest, but I need you to tell me if I'm being honest with myself or not," perhaps?

Joe Pitkin: That's a great question, Robb. So really we're looking for a customer that understands they're looking to consume public cloud in some fashion, but the question might be, "Where do we want to take our applications?" Everybody's talking about containerization. We don't know if these applications are good candidates for microservices. So someone that's kind of, they know that they're no longer looking to consume on prem infrastructure in the ways that they have in the past, but they're not quite sure how they want to necessarily leverage the public cloud to its full potential. So that customer also would primarily have VMware running within their data center because we want to extend that and, you know, create that hybrid cloud extension that we talked about earlier. And in terms of offerings, we have a few quick starts that are really tailored to getting customers off the ground.

The initial one is a hybrid cloud Quickstart where we can essentially stand up a POC and to maybe a larger running instance for customers to start figuring out, "Okay, what does that look like, extending our network into Google Cloud? How do we move workloads back and forth?" What's the strategy once they are running within GCVE to get them bridged with some of those other services we were talking about like big query, cloud storage, things of that nature. And then the other two would be around the disaster recovery and virtual desktop running in the cloud.

So we have quick starts for setting up site recovery manager to fail over workloads, to Google Cloud VMware engine, and then the virtual desktop infrastructure. So either extending, as Sean mentioned, on-premise virtual desktop instance into Google Cloud or deploying a net new horizon environment on top of Google Cloud VMR engine for a customer that is looking to scale out for a maybe surge in remote workforce at the moment.

Robb Boyd: Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Hicks: Yeah, and there's another, there's a lot of we'll call them peripheral concerns, right? That worldwide really comes with the advantage of having deep expertise in traditional VMware based private clouds, and also having, you know, the team that Joe represents, which is our Google Cloud Platform Architecture team. So when it comes to things like planning your migration, you know, doing application discovery, dependency mapping, migration planning, building migration groups, and then actually seeing that through with tools like maybe VMware Hyper Cloud extension, which is a tool we didn't mention much today, but HCA is a big part of this story.

You know, we have the people who have the expertise in that area, or if this is possibly the first time that you've ever run NSX-T, VMware's virtual or software refined networking product, because when you move to Google Cloud VMware engine, you're getting an NSX-T. It's just part of the solution. There's a lot of customers who've never run it before or maybe they ran the older version of NSX. So helping them understand what that's going to look like and how to architect around it, even the interconnect between there's a lot of networking and security that goes into making sure that you have good interconnection between your private cloud environment and your public cloud environment.

And then on the back end of that, you know, when we start talking about integrating with Google Cloud's native services or even planning application refactoring for those parts of application stacks that aren't going to see a transformation, you know, we have a team of, of agile software developers that do nothing but [inaudible 00:36:54], [inaudible] application development. We have the platform architects who can help you navigate all the different services that Google's offering.

So when you combine all of these things together, you know, we talked a lot in this conversation about all these good things, like no longer having to worry about, you know, life cycle management and software components, life cycle management of hardware, racking, cabling, but there are still plenty of things to worry about because let's face it at the end of the day, we're interconnecting our environment with someone else's environment. Immediately, you should think there's going to be complexity somewhere, and that's really where World Wide comes in.

Robb Boyd: Yeah, no. Well said, and I hate to cut you off. We're out of time on this one. I hope that's going to be okay with you guys. But I think that's the whole point, which is the fact that there is a lot of information to share. You guys are very well armed, and I think it's very well obvious that there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. Everybody's situation is very unique and you guys really do a nice job of filling out that niche. And I love the fact that you brought back up the VMware expertise because, boy, even if you're just focused on VMware, it's really hard to keep up with everything they continue to innovate around because they are consistently outdoing themselves. And so now you add the Google on there.

It's all good stuff, but you got to make sure you're right for it and stuff. So anyway, thank you so much. I appreciate both of you. I appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you on the next one.

And guys, I want to just go out and thank you for taking the time to watch us. This has been the TEC37 podcast from World Wide technology brought to you by Google Cloud today.

My name is Robb Boyd. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you on the next one.