Google Cloud announces the general availability of its self-managed VMware solution, offering full administrative control over VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on dedicated Google Cloud bare metal. This new option complements Google's existing managed VMware Engine, providing greater flexibility for organizations to migrate and modernize workloads without altering operational playbooks. It is driven by Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x, allowing customers to maximize their VCF licensing investments. The solution caters to organizations needing direct control over their virtualization stack, custom maintenance windows, and third-party integrations.The self-managed solution utilizes dedicated GCE Z3 bare metal instances, featuring high-performance Intel Xeon processors, substantial RAM, all-flash NVMe storage, and 200 Gbps networking. This architecture supports transactional databases and provides low-latency access to native Google Cloud services like BigQuery and the Gemini platform. Storage is built on VMware vSAN, with support for NetApp volumes as well.Key benefits include commercial flexibility, allowing customers to bring existing VCF subscriptions and apply Google Cloud commitments to Z3 bare metal. NVMe memory tiering and vSAN Express Storage Architecture significantly reduce server and storage TCO, respectively. The solution also offers active live patching to reduce downtime.Google Cloud provides operational and technical advantages, including triple-governance choices (Google, customer, or partner frameworks) and granular capacity sizing. Global virtual networking and seamless AI acceleration through direct connections to BigQuery and Gemini are also differentiating factors.Customers can scale bare-metal capacity rapidly while retaining full administrative control, offering cloud flexibility with required infrastructure control. For those preferring managed services, Google Cloud partners provide end-to-end support for the self-managed VMware solution, covering architecture, deployment, migration, and ongoing operations.The VMware solution on Google Cloud is generally available in 22 Google Cloud regions, with further expansion planned. Interested organizations can find more details on the Google Cloud webpage, review documentation, or contact their Google Cloud account team or an authorized partner.