Oct 29, 2020 — Dell EMC kicked off its Dell Technologies World show by announcing an alliance with VMware to offer Dell EMC hardware on-premises without having to buy it outright.

The VMware Cloud on Dell EMC program offers the entire VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on hyperconverged VxRail hardware. Rather than purchasing it outright, customers can pay for the service every month based on use.

Sound familiar? HP Enterprise has a similar program called GreenLake that does the same thing. Also, Dell has a program called Cloud Flex, a consumption financing offering for on-premises hardware.

The difference is Cloud Flex is more geared toward straight hardware financing, whereas VMware Cloud on Dell EMC (boy that’s a mouthful) is much more of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with VMware managing all aspects of the on-premises systems, so customers get subscription pricing from VMware for services, including edge and data center services using VxRail hardware.

VMware will take care of the management on the software side of things through something called a control plane, while Dell will do the hardware support. The control plane will provide administrators with visibility and management of all on-premises systems, including monitoring the health of their racks, tracking the steps VMware engineers take to resolve service issues, and automatic patching and upgrading of systems end to end.

The hardware can be shipped anywhere in the world — whether it’s to a company data center, a colocation facility, or a remote/edge location — with a Dell engineer going along to help with the installation. The service is currently available in beta testing, with a U.S. rollout slated for the second half of 2019.

Not to let any grass grow under its feet, Dell also announced it is extending its VMware Cloud to support Microsoft Azure. It’s currently on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba Cloud, and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience during the keynote that support for Google Cloud Platform is in the works as well.