VMware aims to merge private and public clouds

VMware customers will soon be able to connect their private data centers to storage and processing pools provided externally by cloud vendors, and manage internal and external resources from within the same software console, the company is announcing Tuesday as it kicks off the VMworld Europe.

VMware’s announcements continue its push for a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), a software layer that aggregates virtualized servers, storage and network resources into one big computing pool. VMware started talking about the VDC-OS last September and still has not announced a release date, but the company is providing further details on its capabilities this week.

VMware says end users should be able to provision their own virtual machines and applications in a “self-service” data center that relies upon chargeback, configuration management, capacity planning, service catalogs and self-service portals.

Moreover, VMware’s forthcoming technology will connect customer data centers to those of external cloud providers, letting them provision and manage all internal and external virtualized resources through the VMware Infrastructure client. Related to this public-private connection is a “vCloud” API that ensures interoperability across public cloud services – as long as they are built using VMware technology.

Rather than being an entirely new technology, the VDC-OS is mainly a new way of thinking about the capabilities of virtualization and how they might be extended throughout both public and private data centers, analysts say.

The VDC-OS is “more about marketing and getting people to think about the virtual infrastructure as the new operating system, and virtual machines as being application containers,” says Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf. “VMware wants to lessen the relevance of the operating system and allow resource scheduling to be done by the virtualization layer.”

In a sense, VMware’s VDC-OS is already on the market, since it simply aggregates all of their existing products, says Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Bowker. The technology upgrades VMware is discussing this week could be available in the second quarter, Bowker says, when the company is expected to launch VMware Infrastructure 4, the next version of its core platform which includes the ESX Server, high availability software, backup technology, dynamic scheduling, live migration and other components.

VMware’s Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets, says the nation’s economic problems are pushing customers toward VMware’s core propositions of increasing utilization of existing IT resources and doing so in a way that quickly deploys new computing capacity to end users.

“Especially in this economic climate, people are ready for a change,” Chu says. “They’re frustrated by the amount of IT spend and maintenance. Customers are ready for computing as a service … IT that’s available on demand.”

The vCloud API, which is in private release for service providers and software vendors, allows applications to be moved from private data centers to external cloud services without being rewritten. Companies that will provide cloud services with vCloud include SAVVIS, SunGard, Telefonica, Telstra and Terremark.