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With vSphere rebranding, VMware refocuses from virtualization to cloud


By Alex Handy
April 21, 2009 — 
Forget VMware: Think vSphere. The virtualization company’s flagship software, VMware, is no longer going to be described as a virtual data center operating system. Instead, the company's suite of virtualization software was rebranded and updated this morning. The software will now be known as vSphere 4.0, and it is being positioned as a cloud operating system.

Jon Bock, group product marketing manager for VMware, said that “there are a couple different ideas of cloud computing floating around. One is this notion that [the] cloud is basically something provided by service providers. But what we're really talking about is broader than that. It's the ability to pool your resources to be able to rapidly provision those resources while still being able to maintain service levels."

Thus, vSphere 4.0 includes revised management tools for provisioning and monitoring virtual machines. Bock said that security and compatibility were also points of improvement for this release.

“A lot of people who talk about cloud talk about it as requiring you to rewrite your applications. We're working with software providers to develop APIs to allow customers to run their own internal cloud without changing applications,” said Bock.

Bock said that a big focus for vSphere is internally hosted clouds. Additionally, the software will also target small- to medium-sized businesses.

Bernard Golden, author of  “Virtualization for Dummies” and CEO of cloud consulting firm HyperStratus, said that positioning VMware as a cloud operating system makes sense.

“Ninety percent of cloud stuff requires a virtualization layer, and on top of just being able to virtualize machines, you have to add a whole set of capabilities around it, things like being able to automate assignment of resources and the automated orchestration of resources. It's analogous to Amazon Web Services, where you say, 'I want this kind of machine and I want to be able to request this much storage.' So it makes sense that that's based on a virtualization layer,” said Golden.

The biggest problem for cloud users and operators, said Golden, is the cohesion of management tools. “That is the place where the challenge is right now; how do you tie together all those capabilities?” he said.

“By default [VMware] is the leader, as no one else really has a plan. IBM has one, and Cisco is doing some things. Really, [VMware is] far in the lead in terms of presence in corporate data centers. They are the big dog in the space. In terms of public clouds, Xen has the lead by virtue of its work with Amazon. It remains to be seen what other public cloud providers will use as their tech.”

vSphere’s “small v” branding is not new for VMware. Recently, the company renamed its VirtualCenter management suite as vCenter Server, and its B-hive Conductor performance booster as vCenter AppSpeed.


Related Search Term(s): cloud, VMware


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