Google Cloud has announced general availability of a self-managed VMware solution that runs VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.x on dedicated bare metal, giving customers root access across ESXi, vCenter, and NSX in 22 regions. It sits alongside the Google-managed VMware Engine and follows similar customer-operated offerings from AWS and Oracle.
With the self-managed solution, Google now offers two models that differ in who operates the stack. VMware Engine, the existing service, runs VCF 5.2 on ve1 and ve2 node families, grants role-based vCenter privileges, and keeps lifecycle management with Google. The new option runs VCF 9.x on z3-highmem-192-highlssd-metal instances, each with 96 physical cores on 4th-generation Intel Xeon processors, 1.5 TB of memory, 72 TB of local NVMe and 200 Gbps networking, with customers or their partners driving upgrades and patching through VCF Operations and bringing their own portable VCF subscriptions.
(Source: Google blog post)
Group product manager Sunny Dua and director of product management Prashanth Bungale wrote:
The launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x by Broadcom is a key driver behind this self-managed deployment option.
In addition, Abhay Kumar, who runs hyperscaler relationships in Broadcom's VCF division, added that license portability lets customers move existing subscriptions and run workloads unchanged.
With the self-managed option, Google provisions the environment and then steps back. According to the deployment documentation, a VMware solution toolkit, driven from the console or Terraform, provisions the bare-metal ESXi nodes with spread placement, configures VMkernel interfaces and Cloud DNS records, and deploys the VCF Installer appliance with a pre-validated configuration. Before any of that, the project must be enabled for VLAN-based networking, the VPC needs an 8896-byte MTU, and management, vSAN, vMotion, and two NSX subnets must exist. From the installer onward, the environment is the customer’s, which is both the point of the model and what it costs.
Storage is vSAN on the local NVMe, with NetApp Volumes supported as an external datastore. The announcement cites "up to 40%" lower server TCO from NVMe memory tiering and "up to 39%" lower storage TCO from vSAN ESA, figures presented without a baseline or methodology, and the only customer quoted, GXO Logistics, describes an early assessment rather than production use.
With this release, Google joins Oracle and AWS in offering customer-operated VCF on bare metal. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution has provided customer-controlled vSphere since 2020, while AWS launched Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS) in 2025 and added VCF 9.0 and 9.1 in July. Azure VMware Solution, by contrast, remains a Microsoft-operated service. The managed model lets the provider absorb Broadcom’s release cadence and licensing changes; the self-managed model hands both back, in exchange for root access and the ability to run the current VCF major version rather than the one the provider has certified.
Consultancy Xtravirt, one of fifteen named launch partners, expects that trade to decide adoption, writing in a pre-launch assessment:
Full control over your VCF estate is only worth having if someone in your organisation wants that responsibility. For plenty of organisations, the answer will be yes. For others, it’ll be: "we want the flexibility, but we don’t want to be the ones doing the patching at 2am."
Google's answer is the partner list itself: Accenture, HCL, IBM, Infosys, TCS and Wipro are among those offering managed operations on top of the customer-owned stack.
The announcement gives no pricing, no SLA, no list of the 22 regions, and names no migration path from VMware Engine’s VCF 5.2 to the self-managed 9.x stack. Google says more regions will follow in upcoming quarters and points customers to its account teams or an authorized partner to get started.