Migrating to Google Cloud VMware Engine moves your virtual machines without moving the assumptions built around them. These workloads are usually the oldest in the estate, lifted rather than rewritten precisely because rewriting them was not viable, and their failure behavior was last documented by engineers who have since moved on.

Ownership tends to split at the same time. VMware administrators know the guest VMs, the cloud team owns the platform, and a guest failure lands in the space between them. Neither group has rehearsed the response, which turns a recoverable problem into a long conference call.

Gremlin helps both teams build a shared, current picture. Install the Gremlin Agent on guest VMs in your private cloud and run Shutdown experiments to see exactly what happens when one fails: what recovers automatically, what needs a human, and how long each takes. CPU and memory experiments surface contention between co-located workloads that neither team can see from their own tooling.

These systems have been dependable for years, which is exactly why nobody knows what happens when they stop being dependable. Testing replaces that gap with an answer both teams can act on.