VMware unveils its cloud OS

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

VMware announced on Tuesday its cloud operating system--dubbed vSphere 4--with plans for general availability in the second quarter.

With the effort, VMware is attempting to bridge virtualized data centers--now known as "private clouds"--and growing cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon.com and others. However, this bridging process is a work in progress due to the lack of standards. VMware's big pitch is that vSphere can run your data center and allow you to bridge out when external resources are needed.

John Gilmartin, director of product marketing at VMware, said the company is hoping to ease enterprises into cloud computing without redoing architecture.

"There's a big gap between what most people talk about as cloud and what people are doing today in the enterprise," Gilmartin said. VMware's plan is to get cloud providers to use its operating system and then seamlessly hook up to enterprises using vSphere 4.

It's unclear what happens if a vSphere shop isn't hooking up to another VMware powered cloud. Gilmartin said the company is working behind the scenes on application swapping among clouds but didn't have details or timelines for such standards. It is clear that VMware sees vSphere 4 as a way to thwartboth Microsoft's cloud OS, Azure, and its virtualization effort, Hyper-V.

Gilmartin argued that Microsoft's approach with Azure requires too many architecture changes for enterprises. He also noted that vSphere will support more operating systems.

(Credit: VMware)

In the meantime, VMware has packed these key features into vSphere 4:

• A 30 percent increase in application consolidation ratios.

• Up to 50 percent in storage savings by allowing virtual machines to only use storage as needed.

• Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings.

• vSphere 4 scales better with the ability to pool 32 physical servers with up to 2,048 processor cores, 1,280 virtual machines, 32 terabytes of RAM, 16 petabytes of storage, and 8,000 network ports.

Here's the chart detailing vSphere 4 vs. VMware Infrastructure 3 (in the "current" column):

(Credit: VMware)

One of the more interesting features of vSphere is a fault tolerance option. Data center managers can keep their most valuable apps running even if the underlying hardware fails. By clicking a box to protect a virtual machine, vSphere 4 creates a shadow copy of the application to take over in the event of a failure. There is a performance hit since you're allocating computing resources to the shadow application, but Gilmartin notes that only 20 percent to 30 percent of enterprise software would have to be fault tolerant.

[eboon]

seems very impressive, but is it going to be available on any public cloud service such as google's? I'm assuming microsoft itsn't going to incorporate it.

[minardi]

I am in marketing and communications. I have lingering questions regarding cloud computing:

How can you trust someone you don't know, that is located who knows where with the privacy of your business data? Would it not make more sense to keep your data close to you on your own server?

What would the enterprise do with their million dollars investments in hardware and software cap? Write them off? IT staffing, firing them (or at least a percentage of).

What if the VM cloud flutters or burst for a reason or another? Who will you call? The bigger the datafarms, more difficult to get support, no?

How could this VM business case make any sense?

[Callandr]

I believe in cloud computing. It does make sense to trust, in fact we already do so. Today you trust the bank with your money, don't you? There is no big difference.

As for if VM is a good technology or not, I am not convinced. I'll stick with Hyper-V for now.