VMware has introduced a service for developers that want to test out building cloud-based applications that will work with virtualized environments based on its products.
The infrastructure service, vCloud Express, will be offered via a number of cloud service providers that have signed up as partners, the company said in its announcement at the VMworld conference on Tuesday.
vCloud Express is based on the company's vSphere virtualization platform. As with other recently launched services, such as the Xen Cloud Platform, it aims to allow a business' internal cloud to work with an external cloud. It offers developers a way to prototype and test applications using pay-as-you-go cloud services that are compatible with IT deployments based on VMware's platform. They can then run those applications in the cloud and on the business' virtualized infrastructure.
Terremark, BlueLock, Hosting.com, Logica, Melbourne IT, and several other cloud service providers, have signed up to provide vCloud Express. These companies are currently offering the service as a beta.
"Terremark's vCloud Express services will provide our customers pay-as-you-go, on-demand access to enterprise-class infrastructure that is flexible enough to offer unmatched compatibility with their own internal IT platforms," Terremark chief executive Manuel Medina said in a VMware statement.
Gartner research director Stewart Buchanan told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that enterprises could benefit from the flexibility and availability of the cloud, but he also warned against the pitfalls that could arise because of licensing terms.
"You have your operating system, your utilities and management tools--all the kind of things you would ordinarily run in-house on this virtual machine," Buchanan said. "Will you be able to lift them up and take them into the cloud? According to (most software vendors' licensing terms), the short answer is no."
Buchanan explained that with, for example, most vendors' databases, licensing is based on hardware capacity--the number of processors, cores, or hosts. He said that, unless software vendors themselves had a stake in the cloud, it would be "quite a difficult challenge" to take advantage of the cloud while respecting existing licensing models.
"As we move into the cloud, we are starting to see more cloud service providers being able to license technology," Buchanan said. "Instead of buying your software and running it on the cloud, we'll see a different model where you build your application but, instead of you providing the licenses, you will buy a license from the cloud service provider."
Buchanan noted that the current licensing environment would limit applications for vCloud Express to products that are safe to license to the cloud--particularly open-source applications.
"Open-source licenses tend not to have issue unless you want to have maintenance," he said. "You will need to negotiate an alternative solution with your maintenance provider, but, in general terms, licensing your product isn't going to be such a problem."
The majority of cloud service providers have been focusing on open-source implementations because of these licensing challenges, Buchanan said, suggesting that the maturation of the cloud market would bring more enterprise-class commercial offerings.
"As the cloud is (established) on a more commercial basis, we are going to see opportunities for companies like VMware to expand their presence through cloud implementations," Buchanan said. "VMware has a well-established brand in enterprise virtualization in the data center, but they haven't really exploited the cloud opportunity yet. That's effectively what they are doing now."
(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)
SAN FRANCISCO--The claim has been made in the last couple of weeks that cloud computing has reached the top of analyst firms' famous hype cycle and is a top-of-mind issue for most IT organizations.
That's a bit misleading, as the interest in cloud computing is often taken out of context, and when you bring virtualization into the picture, that interest seems to remain exploratory rather than strategic.
Amazing innovation is happening in both public- and private-cloud offerings, and the overwhelmingly positive response to cloud computing--in particular to Amazon's top-notch Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and related offerings, as well as Google Apps and the first generation of software-as-a-service superstars, such as Salesforce.com.
But the critical truth--that interest in virtualization technologies currently outweighs interest in the cloud-computing model--has been evident at trade shows I've attended over the the last several months targeting subjects ranging from networking to next-generation data centers to cloud computing itself, and it has hit home here at VMworld this week. The bottom line is that virtualization is where the money is this summer; cloud computing isn't.
Technology trends follow the patterns described by the science of complex adaptive systems. There is constant change and mutation, and there is a feedback loop that encourages stronger innovations to survive and grow while killing weaker ones, yet somehow, the system maintains a working balance that doesn't get too chaotic to manage or too ordered to allow innovation.
As with any complex adaptive system, traits that eventually come to dominate the system tend to start small: a single mutation, or the introduction of a small number of invasive foreign entities, for example. In the case of the "invasive" cloud computing model, the "DNA" is strong.
Amazon Web Services proves that you can get your infrastructure over the Internet. Salesforce.com proves you can run your business relationships through a browser. Both public and private clouds introduce flexibility and efficiency into IT services.
Cloud-computing bellwethers
Cloud computing is definitely in your future, in one form or another. It probably already plays a strong role in your day-to-day computing experience. That said, when you measure audiences at technology trade shows such as Cisco Live and Interop, you see where the real interest of the everyday IT professional is. At VMworld, the audiences at virtualization-related sessions have been consistently larger than those at cloud-centric sessions.
Recent cloud-only conferences have remained quite small--typically in the tens or hundreds of participants--in comparison to their brethren, and cloud-focused sessions at larger shows have been attended by fewer people their virtualization peers. Several of my cloud-focused colleagues have even noted that some shows end up with the same vendors pitching to each other over and over again.
Without a doubt, this is simply an indication of the current stage in which we find ourselves in the long evolution from internal data centers to cloud-centric operations. The ratio of interest will change (or, more appropriately, converge). But if you want to get into the head of most IT tech geeks today, you need to address the subject of virtualization first, then acknowledge cloud computing as a future target.
The best evidence I can personally attest to are the breakout sessions and panels in which I've participated. I have been giving two basic talks this summer, one focused on cloud computing's future ("Achieving the Intercloud"), and one about the journey from virtualization to cloud computing. Without a doubt, sessions with the term "virtualization" in the title have seen the best attendance, whether measured by room capacity or interaction after the talk.
Transitions ahead
What does that mean to the average cloud enthusiast? Well, for one thing, it remains important to see cloud computing as a transition--an operations model that requires addressing technology and cultural issues before widespread adoption. The good news here? Current trends in virtualization, automation, and early cloud offerings are forcing most of those issues to be faced head-on.
It also highlights how much work is ahead of us in helping those responsible for application operations see the value in cloud environments. This education will be greatly accelerated this year, thanks to the amazing work that customers large and small are doing, especially in public clouds. However, it will also require technologies that address the concerns that many have about moving virtualized workloads into someone else's infrastructure.
I'm betting that at this time next year (or the following year, at the latest), most of the convergence of virtualization and cloud interest will have happened, with the exception of the continued interest that service providers and enterprise data center operators will have in the physical infrastructure and management systems needed to provide cloud services.
It will be harder and harder to tell the difference between a talk discussing how to manage an application running in a virtual machine and one discussing how to manage a cloud workload. Many management vendors will demonstrate tools that manage virtualization (such as VMware vSphere) and public cloud services (especially Amazon's EC2 and S3) at the same time, with the same interfaces. Long lines will be form for topics that will have little to do with who owns the infrastructure or how it is paid.
At that point, the decoupling of physical infrastructure management and virtual workload management will nearly be complete--and the cloud-computing DNA will really begin to take over.
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This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
VMware on Monday will roll out a product family dubbed vCenter to automate data center tasks and manage to service level agreements.
The announcements will kick off VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week.
VMware's vCenter products are designed to ride shotgun with the company's vSphere cloud computing operating system.
In a nutshell, vCenter is designed to automate tasks such as data center provisioning, monitoring, change and performance management. VMware added that vCenter is also designed to manage toward policies and service level agreements. Each virtual server that is deployed will operate to a specified service level.
The vCenter family includes:
• AppSpeed to manage service level reporting for virtualized applications;
• CapacityIQ to manage capacity levels of virtual machines resources and data centers;
• ConfigControl, which checks compliance and configuration states;
• Site Recovery Manager, which automates disaster recovery tasks;
• LifeCycle Manager, which automates virtual machines from provisioning to retirement;
• Chargeback, which allocates infrastructure costs;
• And Lab Manager, which aims to ease development, quality assurance and pre-production environments.
The vCenter apps will be sold a la carte per processor. Most of the vCenter family will ship in 2010.
Separately, VMware will announce VMware Go, a free beta service to get small and midsized businesses using virtualization tools quickly. VMware Go is a Web-based service that will walk customers through the ESXi, the company's free hypervisor. The VMware Go beta will start Monday and be generally available in the fourth quarter.
The talk of this year's VMworld conference in Las Vegas was how much of a competitive threat Microsoft, which weeks earlier announced the free release of its hypervisor product, will prove to virtualization leader VMware.
The theme behind Microsoft's push into the virtualization market, as exemplified by guerrilla marketing campaigns at the VMworld event, is that it can offer much of VMware's basic capabilities at a fraction of the price.
The software giant is giving away its Hyper-V hypervisor product to any purchasers of Windows 2003 or 2008 server editions. It's an offer that hasn't gone unnoticed by end users.
Michael Tran, chief technology officer at Digital Sense, a new data center operator, has been considering both the Microsoft and VMware paths, visiting Microsoft in Seattle six weeks ago and VMware this week in Las Vegas.
He had some positive things to say about Microsoft's entry into the market.
"Microsoft's main pitch is that anyone with Windows could have the hypervisor for free, so the net cost of the software is zero," he said. "Anything else is going to look expensive against it."
The Microsoft product "is very cost-effective for smaller organizations and very powerful," Tran told ZDNet.com.au. "It's probably not up to the same level as VMware on many aspects, but then again it has some things that are ahead. Hyper-V is, for example, extremely easy to deploy."
Is price important?
VMware CEO and president Paul Maritz says he is not particularly concerned about competing with Microsoft on price. The price of software is important, he said, "but only up to a point."
"We are in a competitive market, we can't charge whatever we would like," he told ZDNet.com.au on the sidelines of VMworld. "Every software vendor has to deal with the reality of competition. It comes from direct competitors and it comes from the open source movement."
"One of the fabulous things about the open-source movement is that they are the ultimate enforcer of fair pricing. If you don't evolve, they will clone your software, and take away your value."
Such a threat, Maritz says, motivates commercial vendors to "constantly renew their value proposition" with new features.
"We have to make sure that what we offer really offers value for money, and that changes over time," he said. "VMware won't sit still. We have new functionality coming, we're going to double-down our bets, we're going to go in some places fundamentally (in the case of the virtual data center operating system) where Microsoft is uncomfortable going."
Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels Software, competes in some markets with both Microsoft and VMware.
"I don't see VMware losing sales to Microsoft because Microsoft is cheaper," he told ZDNet.com.au, adding most large customers look beyond the cost of individual components when determining price.
"For them, the total cost of ownership is important, the cost of the virtualization software itself is only a small portion of all of it."
IBRS analyst Kevin McIsaac agrees. He says the price argument is "misunderstood."
"VMware has a lot of advanced functionality for optimising memory and getting more out of a processor," he said. "If the VMware software is a bit more expensive, but is more efficient and means less hardware to solve the overall problem, it in conceivable that as a total cost of ownership it might actually prove to be cheaper."
"Rather than looking at the cost of the hypervisor, you have to say, if I were to run my set of applications on VMware or run it on Microsoft, what would the total cost of all the hardware, the software and the storage be?"
Tran balks at VMware's pricing at times, but in building a large-scale data center, he believes the potential return on investment from virtualization technology cancels such costs out.
... Read moreLAS VEGAS--VMware's forthcoming ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor update will allow users to change the amount of RAM allocated to virtual machines without rebooting them, VMworld 2008 attendees here heard Tuesday.
In addition, the new hypervisor will enable businesses to configure virtual machines with eight virtual CPUs and a maximum of 256GB RAM, VMware product manager Carter Shanklin said in a technical briefing at the Las Vegas conference. The current version of ESX Server supports a maximum of 64GB RAM and four CPUs per virtual machine.
Although there have been several rumors about ESX 4.0 published by bloggers, until now, VMware has been tight-lipped about new features in the hypervisor update, which is expected to be launched next year. The ability to "hot-add" RAM to virtual machines should help companies avoid disruption or downtime when they have to make a memory switch.
Shanklin revealed the ESX 4.0 features during a demonstration of VMware's free VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit 1.5, in which he showed how its integrated Microsoft's PowerShell command-line interface could be used to adjust the configuration of a virtual machine running Microsoft Exchange. In the demonstration, the Exchange server virtual machine was upgraded from 1GB to 4GB of RAM without a reboot.
"Microsoft PowerShell is designed for automating the management of Windows applications. All Microsoft server products must support PowerShell to some degree, so time spent learning PowerShell will be time well spent," Shanklin said.
Hot-add memory support is a feature of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.
The VI Toolkit runs on top of Microsoft PowerShell and includes 125 command-line tools for managing servers running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX3i. It is available free of charge as a download from the VMware Web site.
Roger Howorth of ZDNet UK reported from Las Vegas.
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