Google and VMware get closer in the cloud

Google has extended a big fat olive branch to VMware users, by releasing a plugin for vRealize Automation.

The new plugin allows users to “build their own blueprints for Google Cloud resources such as VM instances, Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, and Cloud Storage buckets to publish to the vRA service catalog.” And do it all within vRealize Automation  (vRA), VMware’s cloud automation tool, while also being able to manage other clouds.

VMware is totally on board with this effort, praising it and hailing it as enabling the companies to be “better together”.

vRA is powerful and letting it drive Google Cloud will mean a great many VMware users in the channel and beyond can now more easily send workloads to Google.

But the release of the plugin stands in contrast to VMware’s alliances with other clouds. VMware is all-in with AWS and rumours persist that it will cut a similar deal with Microsoft, which already offers VMware-as-a-service based on the NetApp/Cisco Flexpod platform.

Google, meanwhile, has a tighter relationship with Nutanix that sees the latter compay’s AHV hypervisor run in the former’s cloud.

Releasing the plugin therefore signals that VMware and Google are now closer. But not as close as they are with other partners.