Google opens arms to VMware in the cloud and Microsoft 365 on ChromeOS

Google has offered VMware in the cloud and brought support for Microsoft 365 to Linux, which Microsoft itself has never bothered to do. The last day of January saw an unexpected announcement on Google's Open Source blog. Customers of the Google Cloud Engine can now opt to use VMware ESXi as the underlying hypervisor. Up until …

[L_V]

This is nothing new

Google Cloud VMware Engine has existed for years. It was first announced in July 2019: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/partners/vmware-cloud-foundation-comes-to-google-cloud

What's new here is a GitHub repository to use Terraform to deploy GCVE.

This is a service similar to what other hyperscalers offer: VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solutions, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, Alibaba Cloud VMware Service and IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions.

(Disclaimer: I work for VMware - not on this though)

[Liam Proven]

Re: This is nothing new

[Author here]

My apologies! That had gone entirely under my radar, and Google's blog did not make it clear. Glad there was some remnant value, though.

[mark l 2]

I don't forsee MS doing native versions of Office apps for Linux / Chrome OS any time soon. MS Office is a good tool for Microsoft to lock organizations into using Windows on the desktop so they dont want to give people any more reasons to look at alternative OS.

While MS does create native versions for Mac OS, I think they only do this because they know that there are less business willing to go fulling Apple than stick with Windows.

As if businesses switched over to using Macs they are stuck with relying on one vendor to supply all their PCs. They are probably going to pay more for the equipment, as generally speaking Apple kit is more expensive than Windows PC. Even the cheapest Macbooks cost almost a grand where as you can pick up Windows laptop starting at a few hundred quid. Plus Apple don't really offer any server products anymore so you will still need another OS to handle your server requirements.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

Well, there are Office apps for Android, and Android is Linux underneath.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is based on the Windows 11 Android app runtime.

So, MS _already_ has native Linux versions... and hell still hasn't frozen over.

[captain veg]

there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

Thank Bob for that.

I'm still looking for a home-hosted "drive"-alike to replace my FTP server. Must run on Linux and be available in the usual repositories.

Any takers?

-A.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

Nextcloud

[captain veg]

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

> Nextcloud

Looks a bit over the top for my purposes, and the server software doesn't appear to be in the Mint repositories.

Feel free to tell my I'm wrong.

-A.

[Liam Proven]

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

Syncthing?

[captain veg]

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

> Syncthing?

That could be it, thanks!

-A.