Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway265731 | Hacker News Reader

> This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them

GCP purchased CloudSimple who provides managed VMWare running on bare metal. This isn't a solution co-developed between VMWare and GCP, nor is this a 1st party VMWare solution. I'm not even sure if this is running on GCE, or if its just a re-branding of CloudSimple as GCP VMWare Engine

VMWare Cloud on AWS was built by VMWare to run on AWS ec2 bare-metal instances, and is managed by VMWare themselves.

While similar, they are different.

View on HN

Can you help me understand why this would be useful? What can be achieved with VMWare that can't be done more efficiently with GCP (or AWS or Azure) native tools? The list of arcane product names makes me think this is for enterprises that already invested in VMWare products and just don't want to own servers anymore.

Basically if your entire infrastructure is VMware based, and you need to do something like fail over your existing on-premise to the cloud, or scale way up past your physical infrastructure in a hurry, it makes GCP one of the providers you could possibly price out using without having to reinvent the wheel.

Your data center contract is running out at the end of the month and you need to get somewhere else yesterday.

Most enterprise customers have huge VMware investment. It is much easier for these CIOs to move to cloud with same look and feel as VMware and single pane of glass. Save ton of time in onboarding and operational overhead.

To an engineer, nothing. These acquisitions are part of a coming war over hybrid/on-prem dominance. Corporate VMware installations usually don't mean just a few instances, but entire buildings. If you think of the mobile phone landscape prior to the iOS/Android duopoly, that's on-prem today

It might tickle you to learn of Project Pacific, an upcoming rewrite of VMware to run seamlessly on Kubernetes by default, with an upgrade path for existing installations

I get the idea of GCP to play in the 'VMware <-> cloud arena', but I do not get Project Pacific.

Is VMware developing it because their installed base shrinks as people are moving to bare metal K8s and they simply need to counter that? Or is is there some other benefit such as retiring some parts of their codebase e.g. replacing VSAN by CSI?

Any idea what VMwares motivation is?

The simplified version is that VMware is doing Pacific/etc to stay relevant in a world where virtualization is being commoditized, and where containers will eventually rule most workloads.

Lots of large places are looking at Kubernetes as a way to reduce provider lock-in. Being able to sit down with the CIO and say you have a great migration path for their on-premise setup and it can seamlessly manage cloud workloads is a really nice pitch.

Google theoretically has a similar pitch with Anthos but they’re really not good at sales and GCP has a lot of basic catch-up to do in most areas other than GKE. Say what you will about VMware, they know how to sell effectively and don’t ignore features which aren’t cool CS problems.

Turning your private cloud into a hybrid cloud

That's basically what Pivotal Cloud Foundry is right now, isn't it? You can apply Terraform of the like to on-prem VMs and public cloud or something like that. I have a way better idea for public cloud providers to ween enterprise clients off their data centers. Offer to buy their hardware off of them. Rack them in their own data centers for whatever workloads they can handle. Clients get out from under their sunk costs. Cloud provider gets a long-term deal locked in. Everyone is happy.

As of the beginning of the year, Pivotal is now a part of VMware Tanzu and collaborating in many of these areas within VMware.

I'm not sure that AWS/GCP is cheaper. I'm running 20 VMs on my home vCenter/ESXi setup, and it's costing me $60/mo in electricity. If I had the same setup in GCP, it's be costing me 20 * 56 (20 * n2-standard-2) = $1k/mo.

While I agree bare metal is way cheaper than the cloud, they aren't comparable.

You didn't specify what the hardware cost you, nor what it would cost someone else to buy new and how it compares to cloud servers. Add to that lack of redundancy, having to do hardware maintenance yourself, no add-on services unless you run and manage them yourself, no flexibility in scaling up or down, etc.

IT is probably perfect for your use-case, but not for the use case of the people who choose the cloud.

You're absolutey right—they aren't comparable, and my personal example is misleading.

For clarity's sake, my setup cost ~$10k, and includes a 12TB ZFS NAS server, a 10GBe back end, 2 ESXi hosts totaling 16 cores, 256GB. It also took many weekends to set up (and labor isn't cheap).

The uplink is mere Comcast, and, at 30Mbps, does not come close to rivaling a cloud offering. Also, I'm unable to scale as fast as the cloud (think weeks instead of minutes).

On the positive side, for those of us who love infrastructure, there's nothing like running your own, very small, cloud.

Disclosure: I work for VMware.

You wrong and you'll see

Reply on news.ycombinator.com