VMware Shows Partners New Cloud Computing Technologies

VMware gave its technology and solution providers an early peek this week at some new automation and management technologies it plans to offer to help build a cloud computing infrastructure.

All the talk at the VMware Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas about cloud computing meshed exactly with what solution providers are currently thinking hard about, said Bob Olwig, vice president of business strategy at World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based solution provider and VMware partner.

"VMware has laid out what partners need to get to the public and private clouds," Olwig said.

The way that VMware is laying out its cloud strategy will help its partners address the issue with customers, many of whom haven't yet realized that they are already offering pubic clouds to their customers, said Keith Norbie, vice president of sales at Nexus Information Systems, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based solution provider and VMware partner.

"We are already living in a cloud-like existence, but we don't call it that," Norbie said.

For instance, Norbie said, end users who download from the iTunes site are already working with a cloud in that they are getting a service without being concerned about where that service is located.

IT users are already in a similar situation, Norbie said. For instance, employees are less and less tied to a cubicle and more often are working remotely on what is really a form of private cloud provided by their companies, even if the term "private cloud" is not used, he said.

"The majority of our clients are not yet addressing the cloud," he said. "But we need to tell them that their users are already dealing with them as if on a cloud."

VMware is helping frame that cloud computing message and providing the information to help customers start thinking, planning, budgeting, and executing with the cloud in mind, Norbie said.

"There are perceptual issues," he said. "IT departments don't yet realize they are already providing clouds."

The interest in cloud computing continues to grow, and customers are already working with cloud providers for storage, said Rich Baldwin, CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and VMware partner.

"We're already had several successes working with companies like Nirvanix," Baldwin said. "People are starting to use its storage cloud for backups and archiving."

However, Baldwin said, the industry is still in the very early stages of cloud adoption. Customers will deploy private clouds before they look at public clouds, but it will still be a couple of years before private cloud deployments become common. "And (analyst firm) Gartner is telling us it will be 10 years before public clouds are really ready," he said.

Next: VMware Unveils Technology To Enable Cloud Computing

In VMware's way of thinking, cloud computing should be about making IT more simple for users while giving them the opportunity to choose which cloud to use and the ability to move between providers, said Steve Herrod, CTO for the company.

Herrod, speaking during his VMware Partner Exchange keynote on Wednesday, said there is this idea that there will be a few "uber-clouds" like Amazon or Google, but that's not the way it has to be.

"We want a world in which you can have an ecosystem that can offer differentiation," he said.

Companies looking to simplify their IT will initially develop private clouds to simplify their users' operations, Herrod said. However, to get there, IT administrators will need to look at how to invest in the infrastructure, keep it flexible, ensure SLAs (service level agreements), and so on.

"For partners, that spells opportunities," Herrod said. "You can help your customers move to the new environment, and be their trusted advisor."

There are three primary traits required of cloud computing to make it work for customers, including efficiency, control, and the ability to migrate to and between clouds, Herrod said.

Efficiency refers to the ability to extract resources such as processors, memory, storage, and networking from physical devices and aggregate them into a logical pool of resources that can be allocated and scaled as needed, Herrod said.

To increase that efficiency, VMware this year plans to add a new feature, Transparent Memory Compression, to its vSphere cloud platform. VMware has allowed sharing of memory between servers for 10 years, but with transparent memory compression will allow applications to swap data to memory instead of to disk to increase performance, he said.

VMware's vCenter management platform is also due for a boost in scalability this year, Herrod said. Customers can currently manage up to 500 hosts per vCenter console, but later this year will have the ability to manage up to 10,000 hosts per console.

Also coming this year is increased virtualization performance with the ability to run eight virtual machine migrations, compared to one at a time now. Herrod compared that feature to moving a house, noting the efficiency gain if someone can move eight boxes at a time instead of just one.

Also coming this year is Zero-Touch Infrastructure which allows automation of IT services to be defined by business policies instead of relying on manual processes, he said.

Herrod also discussed a new application, vCenter Operations Suite, which later this year will provide several new features that will increase cloud computing efficiency.

These include the ability to better manage storage capacity with the addition of predictive storage capabilities. Other features will include the ability to better track virtual machine configurations, increased troubleshooting performance, and automated disaster recovery.

The second primary trait of cloud computing, control, refers to the ability of IT departments to manage the availability, security, and performance of their clouds, Herrod said.

In this area, VMware this year plans to add improved control of storage provisioning to let IT departments provide better guarantees of storage price and performance to enterprise customers, and will add improved abilities to control bandwidth.

VMware is also planning to provide improved charge back capabilities and improved visibility on what resources customers are using, he said.

Herrod also provided more details about a new technology, code-named "Redwood," aimed at automating private cloud processes based on company policies.

In a demo of Redwood, a VMware employee acting as if he were a corporate user logged into the private cloud and had access to template and applications that were allowed by company policy.

When the employee started a new application from the catalog which was available to him, he automatically got access to the necessary resources.

Herrod said that all the administration behind making that application available is removed from the user, which is key to cloud computing. "If the user needs more resources, we can do a storage VMotion, but we don't have to tell the user," he said. "The user doesn't need to know."

Furthermore, with Redwood, if the private cloud runs out of the necessary resources for that particular user or application, the user can automatically be moved to a public cloud, he said.

Next: Making I Easier To Move Into, Out Of, And Between Clouds

That flexible migration is the third primary trait for cloud computing, and VMware is working on technologies to automate the process.

Such migration requires making the cloud open to as many vendors as possible through standards, and VMware is working with companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NetApp, and others to do so, Herrod said.

"The notion of letting you use all your applications with whatever vendor you prefer is very important," he said.

For instance, VMware is supporting OVF, or Open Virtualization Format, a standard still in its early phase which allows virtual machines to be stored and migrated between any virtualization platform. Others supporting the development of OVF are Microsoft and a number of open source initiatives including Xen and KVM, Herrod said.

VMware has also submitted its vCloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), which is looking at ways to allow virtual machines to be uploaded and deployed into any cloud, or migrated to another cloud, he said.

The ability to migrate virtual machines to and from any cloud is essential to the success of cloud computing, Herrod said.

"We want to make it possible for people to leave us if we don't provide what we promised," he said.