The Console

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

I’m Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture at VMware and president of the Distributed Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF). I want to share some thoughts on the ever-evolving cloud computing environment, specifically around open standards and open source software.

You might have seen an announcement this week on OpenStack, and I wanted to take this opportunity to shed light on VMware’s opinion on the value of open source and the need to view it differently from interoperability. OpenStack, an initiative between NASA and Rackspace, a VMware service provider partner, seeks to accomplish some interesting standards work similar to other open source cloud projects like Nebula, offering customers another choice in cloud platforms.

We love providing customers choice of hardware, operating systems, management platforms and cloud computing platforms. We expect to see all sorts of cloud computing implementations that will provide customers a range of price points, features, benefits and specs based on their requirements.

But what’s most important to us as it relates to these various implementations – those that currently exist and those that are still to come – is that the interfaces work together so that true choice is possible.

When we look at cloud computing, we approach it from a customer-centric point-of-view. We’re in a new era of computing and we see three key issues with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing that currently concern customers:

• Interoperability (common APIs)
• Portability (standard packaging and deployment formats)
• Security (standards-based security infrastructure)

We’re working on all three of these issues through:

• Our support of the Open Virtualization Format, which is currently the key cloud standard for interoperability
• Our participation in cloud standards development within the DMTF and working with other industry leaders including AMD, CA, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, and SunGard.
• Our work with the Cloud Security Alliance to develop cloud security best practices based on existing standards and technology.

Additionally, we don’t confuse open standards with open source. Open source is a collaborative development process for creating an implementation of a product or service while open standards are developed by a collaborative process to ensure interoperability among various competing product offerings.

We’re huge supporters of open source software efforts, having placed major bets on Spring and RabbitMQ, among others. And while open source makes sense for some product offerings, open standards provide interoperability between open sourced, shared sourced, and private sourced implementations. 

We believe that customers should be able to choose the best products at the best prices and have the flexibility to migrate to a better solution if and when it becomes available. That’s why open standards are critical for both open sourced and other sourced implementations.

We partner with numerous companies, some of which are developing open source cloud computing environments, and we expect those partnerships to continue to grow. But when it comes to interoperability, we encourage customers to judge technologies on performance, not how they were developed.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

A number of our recent VMware blog posts have focused on the newer VMware technology areas... SpringSource, RabbitMQ, Gemstone, and the partnerships we're forming to deliver cloud-portable applications. With this blog post, I get to highlight vSphere and vCenter, VMware's largest engineering investment areas and the very foundation of our broader cloud computing story. Today we are announcing general availability of VMware vSphere 4.1, and I'd like to share a bit more about it from both a technology and an engineering process perspective.

First, the technology… when we launched vSphere 4.0 in May of last year, we highlighted three main themes that are core enablers of cloud computing: Efficiency, Control, and Choice. These are themes that you’ll see us focus on for many years to come, and we’ve made major progress on each of them with vSphere 4.1.

Efficiency: The goal here is to squeeze the most out of your hardware investment and to make management of large, virtualized datacenters simple and scalable. We’ve made major progress on this theme with 4.1. Two areas I particularly like are:

• Memory compression 
• Simultaneous vMotions

I’m also excited in how we’ve dramatically increased the scalability of almost every component of our product suite. In vSphere 4.0, the engineering team made several major architectural changes designed to help the software scale better. We took some advantage of these in 4.0, but with 4.1, we’ve had a chance to really exploit the new software base. Here’s just a selection of the key scalability improvements:

Those are some pretty big increases to a product that is already fairly scalable!

Control: The focus of this theme is helping IT have complete control over the performance and availability of their applications, something particularly challenging in today’s public clouds. The biggest breakthrough we’re delivering in this area focuses on storage and the ability to guarantee certain levels of bandwidth to a VM, even in a heavily consolidated and multitenant environment. There were some early videos showing off earlier versions of this new Storage IO Control capability. You can read more about it and just try to request guarantees on performance from today’s clouds!

Choice: The last theme is around enabling customer choice… choice as to what applications you run, what hardware you run them on, and, as we move forward, which cloud you run them in. With vSphere 4.1, we continue to increase VM performance, making virtualization a no brainer for even the highest end applications]. We’ve also continued to grow our hardware compatibility list substantially, ensuring that you can leverage your existing investments while having broad choice as to your future hardware purchases. As of this writing, vSphere 4.1 is fully supported with more than 2000 server models and more than 2200 storage array targets. And stay tuned for more news as to how vSphere 4.1 forms the foundation of cloud portability…

This is just a short take on the technology advances. There’s lots more data available here and I’ve also recorded a short video to give more context to the above advances.

As for the engineering process angle, I’m extremely proud of how the team delivered this release. After the launch of vSphere 4.0, we have moved to a “train model” of vSphere and vCenter product releases, targeting more regular (and predictable) releases of the software. This is critical to customers and partners, who are basing a lot of their own products and plans on new vSphere and vCenter offerings. And we plan to keep the trains running on time, so we’re already hard at work on the next two vSphere and vCenter releases where we’ll continue to push forward on efficiency, control, and choice.

And I thought I’d close with a bit tech-y, but great quotation about this release from one of our more than 800 beta-testing customers... "This release has the stability of a ‘dot-1’ release with the advancements of a ‘dot-0’ release". Indeed!

Happy virtualizing, all!

-

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Wow… it has been an incredibly exciting, err, Spring for VMware's SpringSource division.

In early April, we announced the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, leaders of the open source RabbitMQ products used by thousands of customers for highly scalable, and reliable application messaging.

In late April, we announced VMforce, a partnership between VMware and Salesforce.com to build an enterprise Java cloud with access to the vast data and great application services offered by the Force.com platform.

And just last week, we announced the acquisition of GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology. We see this as yet another critical offering within our growing application framework. You can read some exciting speculation about where it could head in the blog post from Gemstone's chief architect.

And now I'm excited to discuss another incredibly exciting step forward towards our goal of making Spring the best framework for developing enterprise-class cloud applications. Today we announced a partnership with Google to make Spring even better and to integrate it into the new Google AppEngine public cloud offering.

First a little history… VMware and Google both sprung out of Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University around the same time. We've also both grown incredibly rapidly by focusing on new ways of computing, and we've even used each other's products in various ways. However, we've never done any deep collaboration. We both found this surprising and decided to get several leading engineers from the companies together. When we first met last year, both sides seemed a little unsure… at the time we had fairly different product focuses, customer sets, and cultures. However, in a very short amount of time we realized that we have similar visions of the cloud and similar passions for building great software to achieve this vision.

Our shared vision is to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. The rich applications should be able to run in an enterprise's private cloud, on Google's AppEngine, or on other public clouds committed to similar openness. Thus started an ambitious effort resulting in today's demonstrations at Google I/O and the downloads available here.

For VMware, this Google partnership is a key step in our "Open PaaS" strategy that I blogged about last month. Specifically, it moves the give-developers-choice strategy forward on 3 important axes:

1. Choice of Clouds: Private or Public, VMware and non-VMware

We are committed to making Spring the best language for cloud applications, even if that cloud is not based on VMware vSphere. Google's AppEngine cloud is not currently based on VMware's server virtualization products, and that's fine. Developers must be able to write applications without needing to know what underlying technology powers the cloud that they'll be deployed on. Furthermore, there are many use cases where portability between clouds makes great business sense. For example, they might want to develop and test their application on AppEngine and then seamlessly move it to their own VMware-based private cloud for production execution. Or they might do it the other way around as well!

2. Choice of Add-on Services

The cloud is full of outstanding web services that developers want to take advantage of: ID-handling, messaging, data access, maps and location-based services, data sources, translation, tweeting, and many more. We are working to make the Spring framework let developers easily choose from and leverage these services in as portable a way as possible. One of the most exciting aspects of pairing up with Google is enabling Spring developers to leverage the rich set of services that they offer today and that they'll aggressively add to in the future. 

3. Choice of Which Devices Access your Application

It's clear that cloud applications will be accessed by a diverse set of devices… desktops, laptops, mobile phones, iPads, and more to come. It's a big challenge for developers to customize their code for the specific browsers, technologies, and screen sizes on these different devices. The announced integration of Spring with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), takes us a major step forward in helping developers write their applications once, but enabling a rich user experience on the multitude of devices that may access it. Just wait until you see the keynote demo of how well they've advanced this toolkit!

I hope this has been a useful backdrop for today's exciting announcement. We're still in the early stages of our partnership with Google and of our Open PaaS strategy. You can expect to hear a lot more about additional advances in this strategy in the coming months. And I hope you can all attend VMworld 2010 where we'll be making several more announcements. And congratulations to the engineering teams at both Google and VMware. In a short amount of time, you've shown how two industry leaders can work together and demonstrated how we can aspire to make cloud portability a reality for tomorrow's applications.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It was almost 9 months ago that we acquired SpringSource, bringing VMware one of the most popular Java development frameworks, stewardship of the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities, and a group of talented engineers focused on the efficient development of applications for the cloud-computing era. We’ve recently augmented this team with the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, the company behind the popular open source cloud messaging technology RabbitMQ. These products, along with others that we’ll unveil in the near future, are what we refer to as “vCloud Developer Services” and “vCloud Platform Services”.

In the August 2009 blog post announcing the acquisition, I discussed our rationale for combining SpringSource with VMware and hinted at the directions we’d be going with it. Today I’m excited to see the launch of VMforce.com, the first of what will be many great deliverables based on this acquisition. There are several great blog posts (see VMware’s Rod Johnson’s post and from salesforce.com: Parker Harris’s and Peter Coffee’s posts or Anshu Sharma’s post) that discuss the specifics of the offering. I thought I’d use this blog to step back a little bit and talk about the broader strategy behind VMware’s participation and what you can expect to see moving forward.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

The VMforce collaboration is VMware’s first public implementation of Platform-as-a-Service (abbreviated as “PaaS”). PaaS offerings aim to make developers incredibly efficient by hiding many of the complexities that they face in typical enterprise IT environments such as:

• Waiting for the provisioning of physical machines and their software
• Changing your code to work with the specific middleware components your company uses 
• Handling code modifications that may be required as the middleware versions change
• Dealing with new environments as your code moves from development to staging to production
• Frustrating interactions with the separate operations team when things aren’t working well

PaaS offerings typically offer add-on services available for developers to incorporate into their applications. These include capabilities such as location-based services, identity management, tweeting, chatter, search, and many forms of data storage. The developer efficiency and application richness to be gained through PaaS offerings is clear and we see it as one of the major trends in cloud computing. Today’s PaaS offerings are not without challenges though, and we believe VMware is in a unique position to attack these challenges and help bring PaaS to the mainstream.  

PaaS … with choice

One big challenge with today’s PaaS offerings is that they are all fairly unique and incompatible with one another and with the way that enterprises run their applications. Once you select a PaaS offering, it is easy to become locked into their particular offering, unable to easily move your applications and data to another PaaS provider or back into your own datacenter should the need arise. I should note that this lack of interoperability is a more general challenge for cloud computing as a whole, and one that industry visionaries such as Google’s Vint Cerf recognize and that VMware, along with several others, are working to address.

Enterprises are very concerned with the privacy, security and auditability of their applications – something that is often a concern or blocker for public PaaS offerings. VMware’s PaaS will have a significant focus on enterprise-grade qualities -- providing strong controls for privacy, identity, and authorization control, allowing applications to be extensions of those in the corporate datacenter. 

VMware’s entries into this space will focus on addressing this challenge and, with our partners, creating “Open PaaS” offerings. Now, what does “open” mean in this context? Virtualization is about separating the logical view of server assets from the physical resources upon which they run. By severing the tentacles that crept in between traditional operating systems and hardware, it enables virtual machines with hardware independence and mobility (among many other capabilities). In similar fashion, a PaaS offering can be architected in a way that clearly separates layers and avoids the restrictions seen in many of today’s implementations. Furthermore, the parts of a PaaS offering that the applications depend on (e.g. libraries, messaging, data access) can be built using open development frameworks and technologies with liberal licensing programs. Ultimately this makes it easier for an ecosystem of more compatible PaaS offerings to grow, providing choice for the developers and consumers of the applications. 

Our initial open PaaS offerings focus on a particularly important choice… choice as to where you deploy and run your applications.

Private or Public, VMware and non-VMware

The Spring development framework has done a great job of separating out application logic (java code) from the underlying hardware and software infrastructure needed to execute it. This abstraction makes Spring a natural starting point for a Java PaaS offering, and is also a key enabler of application portability in the cloud computing era.  We are doubling-down on the Spring abstraction layers to make it the best framework for writing truly cloud-portable applications. In this context, cloud-portable means that you can write your code from within an IDE (integrated development environment) and easily choose where to deploy the code for execution. Furthermore, you should be able to extract the code from the cloud it currently runs in and move it, along with its data, to another cloud choice. 

One thing in particular mention here should strike you … we will wholeheartedly enable deployment of these cloud portable applications to clouds that are not based on our underlying vSphere virtualization technology. This support is a key aspect of openness and will enable a broader and more competitive ecosystem of compatible Spring PaaS offerings. And this in turn will be the reason why developers will bet on Spring-based applications for maximum flexibility. Stay tuned as you’ll see many more announcements around this very soon. 

Extra Goodness when Running on a VMware-based Cloud

The VMware portion of VMforce is based upon both VMware’s Spring, vSphere, and vCloud technologies. While we are absolutely committed to making a Spring-based application portable to non-VMware clouds, we’re working hard to make VMware-based PaaS offerings an outstanding place for their deployment. 

One of the key differentiators with EC2 based PaaS will be the efficiencies for the many-app model. Customers are frustrated with the need to buy a whole VM as the minimum service unit for their applications. Our PaaS will provide fine-grained resource separation.

VMforce also utilizes a new vCloud Technology that coordinates the entire PaaS stack, helping Spring-based applications fully exploit VMware vSphere’s capabilities. This coordination will deliver excellent efficiency to the PaaS providers as well as several benefits to the developer and end-users (e.g. automatic provisioning and scaling, self-securing network connectivity, and detailed application performance and availability monitoring). I illustrated a few examples of this in the original SpringSource acquisition blog post:

…as a developer packages up their Java application for deployment, they can indicate at a higher-level how this code will interact and communicate with other hardware and software components. At deployment time, the virtualized infrastructure can automatically provision the database and application server VMs required by this application, wire the VMs’ network connections together, and program vShield Zones to open up only the appropriate network ports between them. 

At runtime, even more exciting things can happen. Information from the frameworks and tools such as Hyperic can pinpoint slowness in the service, and we can remediate the problem areas by altering settings of VMware DRS, cloning another instance of the web server VM, or even interacting with the traffic managers of the datacenter to balance out the load. And on the runtime availability front, backing all of this are capabilities such as VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware HA, which can help the components survive hardware failures or automatically restart as appropriate.

These capabilities will make deployment to VMware-based PaaS offerings particularly efficient and ready for enterprise usage. You’ll also hear a lot more specifics about these new vCloud technologies in the coming months.

Just the beginning of our “Open PaaS” focus

Where you run your application is just one aspect of “Open PaaS” that we are concentrating on. Going forward, I’ll be elaborating on 3 additional focus areas:

• which languages and frameworks you develop your applications in
• which add-on platform services your applications can leverage
• which devices can access your applications with a great user experience

I hope this has been a useful backdrop for today’s exciting announcement. You can expect to hear a lot more about additional products and partnerships all based on this Open PaaS strategy in the coming months. And I hope you can all attend VMworld 2010 where we’ll be making several more announcements!

Read Steve Herrod's post: VMforce and VMware's "Open PaaS" Strategy.

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

In a recent interview Vint Cerf, often referred to as “the father of the internet” was quoted as saying, "We don't have any inter-cloud standards. The current cloud situation is similar to the lack of communication and familiarity among computer networks in 1973." We at VMware agree that inter-cloud standards are critical to achieve the next level of interoperability and provide choices to our customers. We have been working over the past year with other companies in the industry to create and expand these important standards to fill this void.

About a year ago I began posting about VMware’s activities working with a number of technology companies to launch the Open Cloud Standards Incubator which was formed as a committee within the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The work of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator was to focus on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public, or hybrid clouds by improving the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. The group also aimed to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms.

Almost a year later cloud computing has become more mainstream with new products and companies emerging almost daily. Many companies joined in the important work within the DMTF and have made resource and technical contributions to its work.  These contributions include not only VMware’s vCloud API specification, but submissions by other organizations including HP, Fujitsu and Telefónica. The group also released an Interoperable Clouds Whitepaper laying out the existing challenges and needed inter-cloud standards. The group’s public charter calls for it to complete its initial work soon which will begin the next phase of work to extend existing specifications and to develop new specifications where needed.

One of the standards that have emerged as a key technology for Cloud Computing Interoperability is the DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format (OVF).   What started out as a way to package virtual appliances has become an interoperable way to define and export workloads between clouds, which are either public or private clouds. OVF has emerged as a common packaging format and is supported by most of the open cloud APIs that exist today including VMware’s vCloud API.

Another important development this year is the launch of new standards activities in existing and emerging standards organizations. One of the key organizations that VMware joined is the Cloud Security Alliance. This organization is focused on defining best practices as it relates to the implementation of existing security standards and technologies to the cloud computing paradigm.  Other organizations have launched work and have developed specifications and programs for standardization including the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) work in cloud storage standards. In fact the industry has created a portal to track all of the work going on in cloud standards along with cloud standards related events.

We will continue to lead and participate in these important industry standards activities. We believe working with our partners and the rest of the industry to develop common interoperable standards is essential to enable customer choice and for the industry to achieve the full potential of cloud computing.

Posted by Derek Collison
Cloud Service Division

I am pleased to announce that Salvatore Sanfilippo, the key developer for Redis, has decided to join the VMware engineering team. Redis is a high performance and scalable advanced key-value store where values can be data structures such as lists, sets, and hashmaps, as well as strings and blobs. Redis supports atomic operations on these data structures, allowing extremely high performance with consistent state to many client applications.

As VMware continues its investments in the context of cloud computing, technologies such as Redis become key for future cloud based apps, whether private or public cloud, and the cloud infrastructure itself. Large scale systems benefit greatly when there are alternatives to storing state within a centralized relational store (RDBMS). Many Redis customers have already experienced the tremendous benefit of storing select pieces of data within Redis for fast access, customized layout and access patterns. Some have used Redis exclusively, forgoing a relational database all together, since Redis offers several ways to persist the data it manages.

As cloud computing continues to push the bounds of how we define a cloud application, many exciting and new technologies will join the relational database as a means to store and retrieve data. Cloud based infrastructure itself has led the way in this regard, pushing the envelope for scale, performance, and access to large distributed data. This is most evident in Google's App Engine, utilizing several pieces of key technologies like BigTable to store data at scale.

VMware believes these technologies should be beneficial to all. The openness of the cloud computing community matches well with the open source nature of Redis and joins our open source efforts that currently include Spring and Zimbra.  VMware is committed to Redis and the open source community, and therefore in having Salvatore continue his valuable work with Redis. Everyone is encouraged to learn more about Redis and use it within their systems.

There are several places on the internet to find information regarding Redis. If you do not already know about Redis, I encourage you to learn more from some of the links listed below.

Welcome Salvatore and Redis to VMware!

=derek

Posted by Ben Verghese
Chief Management Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms Business Unit

Today VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire certain management products from the EMC Ionix portfolio, including Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra).   These products will provide new capabilities to VMware’s vCenter family of products.

Over the years, VMware has led the industry in virtualization of IT infrastructure. We have empowered customers to reduce costs, increase automation, and deliver new services that they could not before. Now, as the enterprise has increasingly adopted a virtualized model, the foundation has been built for the transition to cloud computing.

There is so much hype around the word “cloud” these days, but what I am referring to is a way of doing computing that enables a revolutionary business model for enterprise IT. Start with efficient pooling of infrastructure to create on-demand virtualized capacity, add automation based on industry-wide and user-local policies, self-service access to a catalogue of IT services, charge-back and usage reporting, and you achieve public-cloud economics with private cloud control. This is IT-as-a-Service.

An IT-as-a-Service model demands strong capabilities and automation across several aspects of management: provisioning, capacity, configuration, performance, business continuity. With the acquisition of the Ionix products, VMware will extend the capabilities of vCenter in order to meet these demands, especially around configuration management and compliance in the enterprise private cloud.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples where the Ionix products complement what we already have in the vCenter line. In the drive to IT-as-a-Service, customers have been asking for visibility into full-stack compliance, from metal to apps. We recently announced the ConfigControl product that works closely with vCenter to provide configuration management and compliance to policies in highly dynamic virtualized environments. Ionix Server Configuration Manager enhances this functionality in two important ways. First, it adds visibility of the guest OS and application configuration on virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Second, it provides built-in capability for Compliance Reports ranging from the ESX hardening guide to HIPAA and PCI. The Ionix Application Discovery Manager product (formerly nLayers) automatically discovers complex applications with components on multiple servers, virtual and physical. The combination of these three products, when integration is complete, will give us comprehensive configuration and compliance capability across a broad domain with virtual infrastructure at the core, but extending to the adjacent areas of the OS, complex applications, and physical hardware if needed.

There are many opportunities to integrate these two sets of products to deliver management value in the private cloud.  Another example of synergy is the potential to integrate Studio and the acquired Ionix FastScale provisioning engine.  Studio enables the application developer or integrator to describe the application and the OS and how it should be put together as a Virtual Appliance. The FastScale engine can slim down the Virtual Appliance and deploy or update the image to a VM (or bare hardware if desired). 

Let me be clear: our goal is to simplify management of IT as customers move to an increasingly dynamic and virtualized infrastructure. However, our customers have varied needs and have also made significant investments in management platforms and tools from our partners.  As we integrate the Ionix products into the vCenter family and accelerate innovation towards a new more agile management model, we remain committed to open APIs, and co-operation and integration with our partners.  This approach has allowed us to jointly provide robust solutions for our customers and we will continue to lead in this area.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

In August, I published a blog post explaining our acquisition of SpringSource, the popular open source Java development framework focused on simplifying the task of application development. Furthermore, we liked how SpringSource targets this application development simplicity for both on-premise and cloud deployment targets. Today I’m pleased to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo.  While Zimbra’s domain is different than that of SpringSource, there are several commonalities in the acquisition rationale on how we will move forward with them in our fold.

First, a quick introduction… Zimbra provides open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration software for deployment within companies of all sizes (e.g. Bechtel, Digg, and Stanford), as well as to cloud and hosting providers offering mail services over the web (e.g. Comcast and NTT Communications).  Yahoo! also continues to utilize Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.  From a business perspective, Zimbra is one of the most popular collaboration software offerings, with more than 55,000,000 users and a subscriber base that is growing rapidly. And from a technology perspective, I like many things about the Zimbra offerings. First and foremost, the team is extremely motivated and talented. Furthermore, the products have really been soundly architected and are known for their outstanding scalability, elegant user interfaces, interesting mash-up creation capabilities (Zimlets), and administrative simplicity.

You may be thinking, “That’s great, Steve, but why is VMware acquiring them?”

There are two primary reasons for the acquisition:

1. Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT
2. Zimbra will add to the portfolio of offerings we provide our VMware vCloud™ partners

Let’s go into each of these in more detail:

Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT

VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas. To date this strategy has involved products and services targeting complexity in datacenter infrastructure (e.g. VMware vSphere™ and VMware vCenter™ Server), desktops (e.g. VMware View™ and VMware Fusion®), and application development (e.g. SpringSource, VMware Lab Manager, and VMware Workstation). With this acquisition, we will extend our focus into email and collaboration, one of the core services (along with areas such as file and print services and identity management) that IT departments universally provide to their users. All four of these technology areas are common to companies large and small. Furthermore, each area is taking growing amounts of IT attention, time, and money without furthering the ultimate goals of the company.

And how can VMware help simplify IT with the acquisition of Zimbra? We are initially focused on two key areas.

 First, Zimbra was one of the more popular downloads on our virtual appliance marketplace. You can think of the virtual appliance marketplace as our version of iTunes, but for business applications. Virtual appliances are just virtual machines pre-populated with an operating system and applications that can be downloaded and easily started without installation and with minimal configuration. Once deployed onto VMware vSphere, the Zimbra virtual appliance will automatically benefit from the built-in VMware vSphere scalability, availability, and security services. We see this on-premise virtual appliance distribution and deployment model as a very simple yet effective approach for providing employees with collaboration capabilities, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). We’ve temporarily taken the existing Zimbra virtual appliance off the marketplace to spruce it up… stay tuned for a new version soon!

 The second opportunity is around cloud-based email and collaboration services. As mentioned above, companies who wish to provide these services from an on-premise datacenter obtain a simple way to deploy and manage their offering. Other companies may choose to rent this service from a trusted cloud provider. Zimbra has already proven to be a popular and effective solution for many companies and individuals, and we plan to invest further in advancing its capabilities for this use case.

Zimbra will expand the portfolio of software that we can offer our VMware vCloud™ partners

This second motivation is very much related to the above point. We launched our VMware vCloud™ initiative just over a year ago to develop an ecosystem of telecom, hosting, and service providers that offer cloud solutions based on VMware technologies. This ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds, quickly surpassing 1,000 members. Today we offer this ecosystem VMware vSphere-based compute and storage infrastructure upon which they can offer what is commonly referred to as “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS). With the acquisition of SpringSource, we can enable our partners to offer a higher level of cloud-based service; one where programmers can write their code and let the cloud handle the details of how and where it runs. This is commonly referred to as “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS). And with Zimbra, we will now offer our partners an even higher level of cloud capability; one where customers can simply use an application without worrying about the details of how and where it runs. This top layer of the hierarchy is known as “software-as-a-service” (SaaS).

In this way, the outstanding Zimbra team and their technology will be an important element in expanding our VMware vCloud strategy to deliver a well integrated portfolio of compute, application development, and core IT service clouds. Furthermore, Zimbra is open source with a vibrant community, highlighting VMware’s belief in, and commitment to, the use of open platforms in the clouds.

And there’s one thing I’d like to address head-on. VMware vSphere is and will continue to be an outstanding platform for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange. We have heavily optimized our virtualization offerings specifically for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange, and thousands of companies are benefiting from the increased flexibility, availability, and security that comes from running Microsoft Exchange on top of VMware vSphere. We have some great material on these advantages available here.

So whether it is datacenters, desktops, application development, or core infrastructure applications, our mission will be to attack complexity and simplify IT. You’ll see much more from us in this space, so stay tuned! And I encourage you to check out the demo videos of Zimbra and also take a look at my new colleagues’ blog post on the acquisition as well.

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

At VMworld 2009 this past September, we rolled out an updated VMware logo as a predecessor to our overall re-branding efforts.  The obvious change that most people saw and commented on was the absence of the “bug” – that part of the logo that is not our company name.  I.e., “Where did the boxes go?”

The original VMware logo that contained the boxes, formally referred to as the rings, first appeared in 1999, and symbolized multiple virtual machines.  It was simple, and yet incredibly descriptive.  The concept of isolated, multiple machines running in a single environment has had an obvious impact on the landscape of IT. 

Now, as we look at our current offerings based on vSphere, and our vision of delivering the infrastructure for unrestrained cloud computing, the image we are portraying to the market has evolved.  In fact, our message embodies the notion of freeing IT from the constraints of physical resources. Our vision talks to a common infrastructure fabric that spans IT, from the desktop, thru the datacenter, and to the cloud.  In short, our message and our vision transcend the idea of boundaries, and extend beyond the box. What was both a useful and familiar logo element for our first decade at VMware, now compromises the underlying tone of our message. In fact, every branding firm we engaged with during this process recommended this change, based purely on how we described VMware and what we do.

We also decided that the use of a bug with our logo was not necessary.  We believe that VMware, our valued and respected company name, stands on its own. Making a change of this nature is something that deserves considerable contemplation and consideration. But in the end, we felt it was the right thing to do. It is a recognition of the evolving value that VMware continues to bring to the market.  And it is now up to us to illustrate the transformative value that VMware represents, in everything we do.  I.e., manage our brand.