VMware Cloud Well-Architected Framework- Sustainability Practices for Google Cloud VMware Engine

Sustainability Practices

Organizations can quickly achieve sustainability and make positive environmental impact by leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine.

By transitioning to Google Cloud VMware Engine, organizations are moving to lower-emission operations run by the cleanest cloud available in the industry today. Google is currently carbon neutral and aims to run entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030. Both VMware and Google use 100% renewable energy and support development towards carbon-free and sustainable systems. VMware and Google incorporate sustainable practices into their products and encourage organizations to make conscious sustainable, low-carbon decisions when building their applications and technology solutions.

Organizations can further contribute to environmental sustainability and carbon reduction by only consuming resources that they need to run their businesses.

Before deploying a Google Cloud VMware Engine Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), organizations must understand the resource needs of their workloads to correctly size the environment. Even after the initial sizing, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides flexibility for organizations to increase and decrease the number of ESXi hosts in a cluster as needed with autoscale policies. Google Cloud VMware Engine monitors the cluster metrics, such as CPU, memory, and storage utilizations, then adds or removes nodes from the cluster automatically.

Organizations can also reduce their carbon footprint by focusing on their workload sizing in Google Cloud VMware Engine. Before migrating workloads to a Google Cloud VMware Engine Software-Define Data Center (SDDC), organizations can leverage tools, such as VMware Aria Operations, to understand the resource needs of their workloads. Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly known as Stackdriver) can also be used to monitor and collect information about the workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine. With this data, organizations can right-size their workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine and use only resources that they need to function properly.

If using any Google Cloud native services due to the cloud proximity that Google Cloud VMware Engine provides, organizations can utilize Google Cloud tools, such as Carbon Footprint and Active Assist Recommender, in order to decarbonize their applications and workloads. Carbon Footprint provides gross carbon emissions associated with their applications hosted in Google Cloud. Active Assist Recommender proactively estimates the amount of gross carbon emissions that can be eliminated by removing idle resources.

Google Cloud VMware Engine enables organizations to accelerate their journey to the cloud as well as carbon-free operations.