The Console Blog

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It has been nine months since we launched Cloud Foundry^TM - the industry’s first open platform as a service (aka PaaS).  Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org and we have seen a rich ecosystem of technology providers and service providers emerge around Cloud Foundry.  Offering a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, Cloud Foundry, currently available in beta, makes it faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications.

We have made great progress delivering a choice of frameworks and application services to developers and now want to highlight the choice of both public and private clouds Cloud Foundry provides today. 

Multi-Cloud - “Write Once, Cloud Anywhere”

As PaaS gains momentum, there will be more choices of cloud destinations. Some developers might want to keep the entire development and deployment within their organization’s firewall; others may want to build internally and deploy via a hosted service, or vice versa.

As you make choices about cloud technology, one critical factor is whether you have a choice of clouds from which to deploy your applications. Ultimately, what many software developers want is an open PaaS environment with a choice of public, private and hybrid clouds for deployment.

When you build and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and open source availability you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

Why Multi-Cloud flexibility is so important?

• Managing your growth and changing needs over time - whether you want to run on private clouds or public clouds changes over time.  Having the flexibility to add capacity or migrate to another cloud without re-writing your applications it is critical for long term success.
  
  
• Protecting against vendor lock-in – you don’t want to be locked into a single cloud provider. Having the option to move between providers that suit your pricing needs or can offer better quality of service is critical.
  
  
• Meet different compliance and geographical needs – you want to be able to pick and choose where you want to deploy your applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, latency constraints and more.
  
  
• Accommodate peak loads – the ability to leverage a choice of public and private clouds to deal with “cloudbursting” scenarios enables you to have the ability to optimize spending.

Cloud Foundry – Making Multi-Cloud a Reality Today

The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners working with us to expand the choice of public cloud providers, private cloud distributions and cloud infrastructures. These partners, combined with simplicity and openness of the Cloud Foundry technology, make the vision of Multi-Cloud a practical reality. 

With Cloud Foundry, moving your application to another cloud is very simple. Simply “target” your new cloud and “push” your application.  No code or configuration changes required.

Looking at the Cloud Foundry command line tool (“vmc”) it looks something like

vmc target api.mynewcloud.com
vmc push myapp

The Cloud Foundry team has a blog post that further describes how Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and tools enables a quick deployment of complex applications across multiple private and public destinations. 

The blog includes a demo showcasing live deployment to five different cloud destinations running Cloud Foundry today without a single code or configuration change to the application.

2012 - The Year of PaaS While Avoiding “Cloud Lock-in”

As many suggest 2012 will be the “year of PaaS”, a critical factor for success is the ability to deploy your PaaS-based application across a choice clouds, developer frameworks and application services. With Cloud Foundry, you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

The past few months have been very exciting at VMware. In July, we launched vSphere 5 and the industry's first cloud infrastructure suite. At VMworld in August, we unveiled our vision and products to liberate and support end-users in the Post-PC era. And today during the opening keynote of VMworld Europe (where we have more than 7000 registered attendees!) we are adding to the fun. We are announcing three new product suites that deliver a new approach to IT management – an approach that is specifically targeted at the “cloud era.”

As Paul Maritz pointed out in his August VMworld keynote, we’re now in a world where more than 50% of the total server workloads worldwide are virtualized. Amazing! Virtualization is really an on-ramp to cloud computing, enabling more and more enterprises to enter the cloud era. This has profound implications, impacting every facet of the IT landscape. For example, by separating applications from the hardware they run on, virtualization enables consolidation and mobility. However, many existing management tools and processes weren’t designed with this in mind. The cloud also requires changes to how IT is delivered, evolving to a model of instant, self-service access to elastic capacity. And finally, the cloud introduces a new dimension of choice (the enterprise datacenter is no longer the single source) that is changing the role of the CIO from IT provider to service broker.  I like to call this the “builder to broker” transition.

All of these changes are very powerful, and they have profound impact in terms of what it means to manage IT.  It’s time for an IT management rethink, and we believe that a new approach represents the next important step in the journey to the cloud. Done properly, this new approach should help enterprises move even more of their applications into the cloud and amplify the value they get from them being there. We feel this is so critical that we now have the majority of our engineers focused on developing management-related innovations across all of our product lines.

So, what is unique about VMware’s approach to management?  First, we believe the platform needs to shoulder much more of the management burden, embedding and automating as many capabilities as it can. This has been a guiding principle for many of the innovations in VMware vSphere – vMotion, DRS, HA and FT – and we will continue our quest to move this forward. We’re also constantly looking at manual interactions with vSphere and trying to get rid of as many as possible. We want to automate everything in sight as this is the only way customers will be able to achieve the efficiency and economics of cloud computing. 

Next, we believe the days of managing silos – of machines, of application stacks and of discrete disciplines – are over.  It is time to converge these disciplines, streamline and remove steps to create more agile, shared processes. This phenomenon is well recognized in the application delivery space as “DevOps”. We think there’s also key convergence in a new discipline of “CloudOps”.

Finally, cloud management must support high-velocity, dynamic environments.  The pace and scale of today’s IT demands require teams have visibility and control, but more importantly, they need the ability to focus on what really matters.  There’s simply too much data out there. We are focused on how to best filter this information, bringing the key facts to the appropriate team’s attention. This applies at all levels, from the server and storage administrators to the CIO and CFO.

The new product suites we are introducing today apply these foundational principles to simplify how customers manage infrastructure, applications and the business of IT in the cloud world:

• We first introduced the vCenter Operations Management Suite in March 2011, and we have had overwhelmingly positive response from our customers. Paul often talks about how VMware is out to “make infrastructure disappear,” and vCenter Operations helps deliver this. Its advanced analytics “learn” normal behavior in order to drive high levels of automation. The enhancements we are announcing today continue to converge performance, capacity and configuration management, and will support cloud-scale operations, or “CloudOps”.   

• The next area undergoing change in the cloud world is application management.  The changes to infrastructure brought about by virtualization about are forcing fundamental changes in how enterprises build, deploy and manage the next generation of applications.  These previously siloed functions are increasingly converging, and new processes like “DevOps” are emerging.   The new vFabric Application Management Suite will help unite development and operations, simplifying and automating the way customers deploy, monitor and optimize their applications across clouds.  

• As I mentioned earlier, cloud is causing the role of the CIO to evolve from builder to broker. The third suite of products we’re announcing today is aimed at supporting this evolution.  With so many choices – public clouds, private clouds, SaaS, traditional datacenters – now, more than ever, CIOs need the right information to make informed decisions about how to deliver services to the business.  The VMware IT Business Management Suite will converge the disciplines of IT finance management, service level management and vendor governance to give the CIO comprehensive visibility over cost and risk.  

These new management suites have been under development for multiple years now, and our entire company is thrilled to launch them today. If we can crack the code on how to operate and manage IT in the cloud era, we will open the door to a new world of amazing achievements. And while it’s not quite the “World Peace” I alluded to in the keynote, IT as a Service will be pretty good, too. :-)

If you want to learn more about the suites we are introducing today, you can dive deeper at: http://www.vmware.com/go/management-experience

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Each year there is one event I look forward to more than any other – VMworld.  VMworld brings together the leading industry innovators to share virtualization and cloud best practices, showcase breakthrough new technologies, get hands-on in the Labs, and catch up with old friends.  This week in Las Vegas we're hosting the biggest VMworld to date, with more than 19,000 virtualization and cloud geeks gathered to push the industry forward together (I remember being shocked to see 800 people attend just a few years ago!).  

The volume of news from the show is staggering.  You can read some truly impressive announcements across the board here and replays of the General Session keynotes, including VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s vision for the industry and my own technology-preview session, can be viewed here.   

I can’t possibly do justice to all of the amazing innovations, incredible customer stories, and just plain cool stuff going on at the show, but I did want to take a moment and highlight a few of my favorite moments so far:

Major Enterprises Pushing Ahead With the Cloud:  with just about every IT vendor guilty of pushing their marketing collateral with cloud terminology, it’s no wonder there’s healthy skepticism in the market.  So it was fantastic to see leading global brands talking about how they are gaining competitive advantage today with their virtualization and cloud deployments.

• Founded in 1932, Revlon is one of the world’s leading beauty brands, doing business in more than 100 countries on 6 continents. Leveraging vSphere and other VMware cloud technologies they’ve been able to take more than $70 million in cost out of their infrastructure, achieve a 300% increase in project throughput, and have virtualized 98% of all workloads globally (they literally have only 2 Unix servers left in their entire global footprint!). This has enabled Revlon IT to be much more responsive to the needs of the business, align projects more quickly to revenue opportunities, and be a true competitive advantage for the company. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZxZz1m8KKQ]
• The New York Stock Exchange is not only one of the world’s leading capital markets operators, they are also delivering specialized cloud services to the financial community. The low-latency, high-frequency environment places extreme demands on their virtualized infrastructure but they continue to push the envelope with VMware’s cloud infrastructure technologies. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyYwo6AZ7_I]

• We all know Southwest Airlines for their low fares and great customer service. But as the largest domestic carrier in the US, more than 85% of their revenue is driven through the web. vFabric technologies underpin much of southwest.com and by leveraging vSphere infrastructure on the back-end, Southwest has gone from 0-40% virtualized in less than 18 months and seen a reduction in time to deliver production servers from 6 days to one hour.  [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHobD1eBG8]

Liberating IT and End-Users from Legacy Silos:  as we enter the post-PC era we all know the pressures the consumer world is placing on enterprise IT.  Employees expect their experience to be equal to their home life and they expect it “to just work” on whatever device they choose.  And if it doesn’t….well, they’ll take things into their own hands creating a security, management, and compliance nightmare.

Now this is easy to talk about but very, very difficult to crack. At VMworld we demonstrated a complete solution that gives IT a fighting chance -- helping customers bring forward legacy Windows environments with the full-featured View 5.0 delivering updates to our Horizon Application Management platform, enabling both a secure corporate and personal persona on users’ mobile devices with Horizon Mobile, and advancing universal application and data delivery with Project AppBlast and Project Octopus. VMware’s vision seeks to free employees and enterprise IT from more than two decades of complex, device-centric computing, and delivers a more user-centric, IT-as-a-service experience. I’m using most of these new products internally via our “dogfood” program and am loving it. (Some trivia: Our own Paul Maritz is attributed as being the first to run “dogfood” programs in software companies!)

The World’s Leading Cloud Infrastructure Platform: as Paul Maritz pointed out in his keynote, we’re now in a world where more than 50% of the total workloads worldwide are virtualized – we have definitively entered the Cloud Era and VMware is dedicated to accelerating and amplifying our customers’ resulting benefits.  Our product teams take tremendous pride in extending the lead of our technologies and it was a thrill to show off the results of more than 1 million engineering hours. We’re raising the bar yet again on what customers can expect in terms of performance, availability, and security for their core cloud infrastructure and even tackling the next datacenter frontier with VXLAN, taking on networking the way we’ve taken on storage and compute (stay tuned for more in this space). And as one attendee told me, “it’s about automation, automation, automation.” We’re continuing to drive management and automation innovation for an even more application-aware, automated infrastructure. And the message should be quite clear that our mission is to get customers to this new world, but in an evolutionary way. We’re constantly looking at a technology rollout that helps our customers bridge from their existing infrastructure environments to this brave new world of the cloud.

It’s been an amazing first few days here in Las Vegas and I want to say thank you to all of the employees, partners, customers, students, VMUGgers, “Labbers,” and technologists with a passion to move the industry forward.  Without your desire to invent the next-generation of IT none of us would be here to celebrate these amazing innovations.  Every year I am humbled and awed by the creative conversations in the hallway, the sci-fi-like demos on the exhibit floor from companies both new and old, and the enthusiasm and energy from folks who have traveled from across the world.  It’s truly a privilege and I can’t wait to share what’s in store in our VMworld Europe event this Fall and next year as we return to San Francisco!

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

VMworld 2011 is well-underway with more than 19,000 attendees gathered in Las Vegas to learn about, celebrate, and drive the future of both virtualization and cloud computing. The amount of news has been staggering, but I want to take more time to focus on one particularly important announcement in this blog; a new vision and approach for networking in the cloud era.

Cloud computing holds the promise of accessing shared resources in a secure, scalable, and self-service manner, and these core tenets place huge demands on today’s physical network infrastructure.  While compute and storage are virtualized, network is still a physical impediment to full workload mobility and can inhibit multi-tenancy and scalability goals. Even with VLAN technologies, the network continues to restrict workloads to the underlying physical network and to non-scalable, hard-to-automate constructs.

Have we seen this before?

I like to think about this problem as similar to one we’ve previously seen in the telephony industry. One of the fundamental challenges with today’s networking is that we use an IP address for two unrelated purposes, as an identity AND as a location. Tying these together restricts a (virtual) machine from moving around as easily as we would like. We had the same challenge with telephony before wireless came of age… our phone number rang for us at a specific destination rather than following us wherever we went!

Just as our mobile phone numbers allow us to take calls virtually anywhere, separation of a machine’s network ID from its physical location enables more mobility and efficiency for applications. And this is exactly what we’re after in the cloud… a model that enables the efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across shared cloud infrastructures both within and across datacenters. This improved mobility will ultimately enable better approaches to load balancing, disaster recovery, power-usage optimization, datacenter provisioning and migration, and other challenges approaching us in the cloud era.

Welcome VXLAN!

VMware has collaborated with Cisco and other industry leaders to develop an innovative solution to these challenges called “VXLAN” (Virtual eXtensible LAN). VXLAN enables multi-tenant networks at scale, and it is the first step towards logical, software-based networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available. How does it work?

Using “MAC-in-UDP” encapsulation, VXLAN provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines (VMs), independent of where they are located.  It completely untethers the VMs from physical networks by allowing VMs to communicate with each other using a transparent overlay scheme over physical networks that could span Layer 3 boundaries.  Since VMs are completely unaware of the physical networks constraints and only see the virtual layer 2-adjacency, the fundamental properties of virtualization such as mobility and portability are extended across traditional network boundaries. Furthermore, logical networks can be easily separated from one another, simplifying the implementation of true multi-tenancy.

And VXLAN enables better programmability by providing a single interface to authoritatively program the logical network. Operationally, it will provide the needed control and visibility to the network admin while allowing the flexibility of elastic compute for the cloud admin.

And VXLAN can be implemented to be very efficient and resource savvy. We take advantage of efficient multicast protocols for the VM’s broadcast and multicast needs. We leverage Equal-Cost Multi-path (ECMP) in the core networks for efficient load sharing. And within the virtualized environment we leverage vSphere’s DVS, vSwitch, and network IO controls to ensure the VMs get the bandwidth and security that they require. Cisco will certainly leverage the N1000V switch as one key place for VXLAN implementation, and other partners will soon announce their approach as well.

A Collaboration

VMware has collaborated closely with Cisco and industry leaders including Arista, Broadcom, Brocade, Emulex, and Intel in making this an industry-wide effort and to ensure a seamless experience across virtual and physical infrastructure. As part of this effort, we have published an informational IETF draft (see http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-00.txt) to detail the use case and the technology. To achieve its full potential, VXLAN must be adopted across the industry, and we’re committed to helping this happen in an open and standards-compliant way.

In Closing… 

VXLAN is the flagship in a growing set of capabilities that deliver a new model of networking for the cloud. For some additional context, be sure to check out Allwyn’s blog on logical networks from May. It addresses the physical limitations associated with today’s networking infrastructures in an evolutionary way, and offers a model that enables the efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across cloud infrastructures. And what’s more, it does so in an evolutionary way that leverages today’s network infrastructure investments. Stay tuned for even more updates on this exciting new development!

Posted by Dean Coza
Director of Product
Management, Security

I’m excited to inform the community that VMware today acquired PacketMotion. PacketMotion is focused on delivering user activity context for network segmentation and data access monitoring and recently introduced the PacketSentry Virtual Probe, which is optimized to efficiently monitor and enforce identity based network access controls in VMware vSphere.

Security is an important component of VMware’s strategy to help companies transform IT through more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure. On July 12 we launched vShield 5, introducing new sensitive data discovery and intrusion detection capabilities to give customers deploying hybrid clouds visibility, control and confidence in the compliance of their critical applications and regulated data. These capabilities give us the what and the how of this equation (the sensitive data and its location). PacketMotion can provide the who (who is accessing it). The combination presents an opportunity to make it possible for customers to automate security and compliance policies in a completely business-driven language, such as “give HR access to HIPAA vApps” or “give Finance access to the PCI-CDE vApps.” This will greatly simplify the automation of security and compliance in the hybrid cloud.

PacketMotion also has a rich set of user access monitoring reports which support various compliance control objectives and will enrich VMware and partner compliance automation solutions.

With customers spanning many industries, including financial services, manufacturing, energy, government and healthcare, PacketMotion is known for its innovation. It was recognized as a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in 2009, and an “IT Innovator of the Year” by SC Magazine for 2010. We expect to integrate PacketMotion technologies into the vShield portfolio, and the PacketMotion team will join VMware’s Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit. We welcome them to the VMware family and look forward to continuing to deliver on our “better security with virtualization” promise.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Only a few months have passed since VMware launched Cloud Foundry^TM  -  the industry’s first open platform as a service implementation and a major milestone in our mission to “Simplify IT”.  Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org.

We’ve promised to shortly deliver a version of Cloud Foundry that will run in a single virtual machine. We call it Micro Cloud Foundry^TM and its BETA availability is accessible today at http://micro.cloudfoundry.com

As outlined in a previous post, Cloud Foundry is all about choice - choice of developer frameworks, choice of application infrastructure services, and choice of clouds to which to deploy applications.

By offering an open architecture in all three dimensions, Cloud Foundry greatly simplify the lives of developers and makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. 

“Honey, we shrank the Cloud”

Today we are taking the next step toward providing developers what they need - a simple PaaS solution you can quickly download and install on your machine.

Micro Cloud Foundry is a downloadable version of Cloud Foundry that can run on a developer’s laptop.  It contains a version of the Cloud Foundry software and offers symmetry with other instances of Cloud Foundry.  It allows access to modern frameworks and a rich ecosystem of application services from VMware, third parties and the open source community. Applications deployed on Micro Cloud Foundry will run with minimal modification on any private or public cloud running Cloud Foundry, thus demonstrating a true Hybrid Cloud solution.

Many developers are already using the Cloud Foundry open source bits to build their local versions of Cloud Foundry. Micro Cloud Foundry will make this process significantly easier and will enable developers to easily “shrink the cloud” to their local machine and experiment with cutting edge technologies without the hassles of installations and configurations.

What is included in Micro Cloud Foundry?

Micro Cloud Foundry supports Java on Spring, Ruby on Rails/Sinatra and Node.JS frameworks as well as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis services.  It supports both Cloud Foundry’s scriptable command line interface (vmc) and integration with the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This allows developers to retarget deployments between on-premise and public environment without code modifications. 

With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their micro cloud wherever they happen to be working – whether at home, office or coffee shop – without any reconfiguration required.

Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a downloadable virtual machine image compatible with VMware Fusion for MacOSX, VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows.  It provides an easy install, setup and VM management mechanisms.

Micro Cloud Foundry is a developer focused offering, designed to support development and testing use-cases. VMware will provide frequent Micro Cloud Foundry updates to include additional frameworks and services. Micro Cloud Foundry is currently a beta offering and is free of charge.

For more details on what’s under the covers with Micro Cloud Foundry,  please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at http://blog.cloudfoundry.com

How is the Cloud Foundry project evolving?

Over the past few months, we have experienced outstanding interest in Cloud Foundry, both at the CloudFoudry.com service, the CloudFoundry.org project and the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.

The interest in CloudFoundry.com continues to grow with the number of beta users more than doubling since last quarter and the number of applications increasing over 3x. These applications leverage a wide variety of development frameworks, including Java on Spring, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Sinatra, Node.js, Grails and Scala on Lift. CloudFoundry.com users continues to increase their usage of the ecosystem services, including MySQL, Redis and  MongoDB.

The interested in CloudFoundry.org from the open source community has been incredible. We have received hundreds of community contributions to the open source project, including new frameworks and languages like Erlang and JRuby as well as some early projects around PHP and Python and data services like Neo4J.

The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners, working with us to expand the developers frameworks, application services and deployment destinations available for Cloud Foundry users.

VMware continues to drive core innovation to CloudFoundry.com by adding new frameworks and languages like Scala and Lift as well as services like RabbitMQ Cloud Messaging and a free Hyperic plugin  to provide increased monitoring and visibility to applications.

Happier Coding

Developers can continue to avoid the many hassles of updating machines and configuring middleware and focus their attention on delivering applications, today in their own laptop or desktop behind the corporate firewall.

For more information on Cloud Foundry, and to download your Micro Cloud Foundry, please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com

Today is a great day at VMware as we launch our cloud infrastructure suite, a coordinated advance in the collection of software required to build secure, efficient, and enterprise-ready clouds. Today’s announced releases include vSphere 5, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, vShield 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the new vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0.  These are joined by vCenter Operations, which we launched in March of this year, to complete the offering.

I’ve found myself to be a bit nostalgic during this release, thinking back to when I joined VMware in 2001. This was right in the middle of a big ESX 1.5 release (anyone out there remember this one?), and our big worries were around booting Windows NT quickly enough and handling 100Mbps networking. We have come a long way from simple virtualization, and today's release represents major advances in our innovation around cloud computing. 

Below are all links to many details on the products we’re announcing today but there are a few higher-level highlights from my perspective:

• This vSphere 5 release marks an important milestone in virtualization performance. With its 'monster' VMs (32 vCPUs, 1TB of virtual RAM, and very substantial storage and networking speeds), we’re ready to take on even the most demanding of applications. 

• We have made great strides on delivering the agility that is so attractive in a cloud computing environment, with special focus on intelligent “policy-based” automation, which we are calling intelligent policy management. New innovations include Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS capabilities, all of which help your cloud satisfy extreme elasticity needs and tight performance guarantees without manual intervention. 

• And I am particularly proud that VMware is the first company to offer a “suite” of cloud computing products. Traditionally companies have had to select, install, and cobble together disparate software tools themselves. With this release, we’re helping customers create their clouds in a simpler and more efficient manner, decreasing the time to get started and ensuring a more seamless experience once up and running.

• All of these product offerings, VMware vSphere 5 together with the updated cloud infrastructure suite, are expected to be available in Q3, 2011.

These highlights and the 200+ new capabilities that you can read about below are a tribute to our global product teams and their relentless focus on these offerings over the last two years. I’m quite proud of them all and made this little video to help you meet the suite and get a little tour of our Palo Alto campus along the way.

Thanks for your time, and I hope you take the chance to learn even more about our new offerings below.

Cheers,
Steve

More about this latest version of vSphere: 
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/overview.html

This release of vSphere removes the service console. Learn more about the transition from the traditional ESX architecture to the lighter weight ESXi: 
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/overview.html

Here’s more about vShield and how it can help provide trust in the cloud: 
http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/overview.html

This second release of vCloud Director has a number of improvements: 
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html

Here’s where you can learn all about the new vSphere Storage Appliance:
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/vsphere-storage-appliance/overview.html

Learn more about vSphere replication and other new capabilities in vCenter Site Recovery Manager:
http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/

And along the way, we’re continuing to advance many other features including High Availability (http://www.vmware.com/products/high-availability/overview.html) and load balancing (http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtualization-topics/high-availability/load-balancing/load-balancing.html)

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

In April I introduced VMware’s acquisition of SlideRocket with a blog entry entitled, “The New Way to Work – End-User Computing in the Post-PC Era”. Today I am happy to announce the next step in this journey with our acquisition of Socialcast, a powerful “Enterprise Activity Stream Engine” that unites a company’s people, information, and applications in real-time. In this blog, I discuss this social platform and how it helps evolve the way we work.

First, let’s step back and look at today’s approach to enterprise communication. For the last 30 years, personal computing has primarily focused on automating the metaphors of the pre-digitized workplace including the “inbox” and “outbox” tray, manila folders, and printed documents. We’ve largely replaced printed memos, mail carts, and filing cabinets with documents, email, and file shares. These tools have dramatically improved our productivity, but the increasing volume of information can be overwhelming and requires manual prioritization and organizational work to keep up with this data deluge.

While traditional mail- and document-centric interaction will certainly remain critical, there are new approaches to collaboration taking root that better exploit the paradigms of the web. For example, communication is increasingly iterative, with fine-grained interaction replacing letter-like back-and-forth. Furthermore, these activity streams increasingly take place across dispersed groups of informally linked collaborators rather than following the boundaries of a formal organization hierarchy. And in today’s frantic world, the information in these activity streams should only interrupt the right people at the right time… and of course be safely archived and searchable. In summary, there is an opportunity for improved collaboration across a company that can drive new levels of productivity and employee satisfaction.

VMware is dedicated to the delivery of the technologies and infrastructure needed to enable this new way of working. We see this new approach as an indication that our industry has entered the post-PC era, enabled by advances in mobile devices, SaaS, and cloud computing. This disruption was the rationale behind our acquisition of SlideRocket and Zimbra, and the catalyst for the launch of VMware Horizon App Manager.

Over the last 3 years, Socialcast has been growing rapidly and garnering the reputation as a true visionary in the enterprise collaboration space. By focusing on people and their work habits, they have developed a platform deployed by some of the world’s largest companies to facilitate communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise. The Socialcast team has achieved this success by delivering the key elements of next-generation enterprise collaboration… real-time activity streams, a social graph of the entire enterprise, and the ability to participate in contextual- and purpose-oriented groups. These are fairly standard elements in this space, but there are four traits that make Socialcast particularly special:

1. Rich integration capabilities
2. Safe Collaboration wherever you work
3. On- and Off-premise deployment
4. A platform for new collaborative applications

Rich Integration Capabilities

Rather than define enterprise social as yet another tool to use or as a feature rooted in a single application, the Socialcast approach emphasizes the integration of social capabilities across the applications, data, and services that people already use. Socialcast includes an integration capability called Reach to add social elements into existing content sources like SharePoint and wikis. This brings collaboration to the places where people, applications, and data already exist.

Safe Collaboration from Wherever You Work

It’s obvious that we’re all more mobile these days as well, and the Socialcast platform offers the freedom to participate in collaboration from rich clients, mobile devices, email, and most importantly from within a range of native Windows, on-premise or cloud based business applications. All of this while offering the enterprise the compliance and security features that are required to satisfy end-users, IT and legal groups.

On- and Off-Premise Deployment

We’re clearly in a hybrid-cloud world, with IT offering some services from within their own datacenters and some services from the public cloud. Why force a choice? With Socialcast, you have your choice of on- or off-premise deployment, as it is available either as SaaS or as a VMware virtual appliance that can be deployed behind the firewall. Cool! 

A Platform for New Collaborative Applications

And last, but not least is the opportunity to build new enterprise applications upon the core Socialcast platform. It’s still in the early days, but it seems inevitable that enterprises will leverage the employee network and improved collaboration capabilities to change the way they receive feedback, track projects, or do any number of other tasks. For a look at one such application, check out the Socialcast Townhall offering… and stay tuned for other such examples.

Customer Success

Several big customers are enjoying the benefits of Socialcast today. Nokia has deployed Socialcast to alleviate the logjam associated with traditional email communication as well as enable new ways for executive management to communicate and interact with their global workforce. The SAS Institute has deployed Socialcast as the hub through which employees can exchange information as well as using Reach, to add social elements to their SharePoint and wiki installations. Humana has also leveraged the Reach platform to create whole new applications that increase employee engagement by incorporating social gaming elements to reward and recognize employees across their worldwide operations. And we’ve just deployed Socialcast within VMware as well, and are already seeing the signs of a more collaborative, productive, and informed organization.

Examples such as these illustrate the richness of the user experience in the post-PC era. Users can easily tap in to collective knowledge and expertise inside and outside their business, reduce unnecessary meetings and redundant communications, and do all this without being tethered to their desk. VMware is leading the way forward in this era, and the combination of our world class technologies and Socialcast’s focus on social communications and applications will accelerate this transformation of the way people work.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Cloud computing is the most impactful advance in information technology in years, and VMware’s contributions to this field have been defined by innovations affecting almost every aspect of our technology interactions. From changing the way that IT looks at servers and the datacenter, to delivering the next generation open application platform, to redefining the role of the desktop, VMware innovation has led the charge. But we’re just getting started…

The cloud is about much more than just making the IT department’s life easier. End-users deserve to reap the benefits of the cloud as well, and “your cloud” is focused on delivering these to both IT and end-users in a very personalized way. Let’s make this a bit more concrete…

I don’t know about you, but I frequently find myself doing silly things at work. Have you ever found that you

• Email yourself large documents so that you can access them from home or from multiple devices?
• Collaborate on documents by sending around files with names like”vmworld-keynote-v11-PM-SH.ppt”?
• Live with a clogged mailbox where almost all company communication (both relevant and not) occurs?
• Carry two mobile phones so that your personal life can be kept separate from your work life?
• Spelunk for your VPN token just to get access to a single file at work?
• Constantly copy and update “standard” presentations to get the latest templates and data or to customize just one page for a specific audience?

These are the sorts of problems we’re attacking in our end-user computing group at VMware. Our mission is to help users get their work done quickly, effectively, safely, and collaboratively. Along the way, they should have their experience at work be as engaging and enjoyable as when working at home with consumer applications.

To date we’ve attacked these problems through our VMware View, ThinApp, and Zimbra products, and today I’m happy to announce another step forward in offering people a new way to work.

Today, VMware is announcing the acquisition of SlideRocket – the leader in online presentations. SlideRocket’s focus on improving the process of building, delivering, and sharing presentations is a testament to the potential of cloud computing to change how business users work, providing them with technology that makes them happier, engaged and more productive.

Presentations are second only to email as the most commonly used business tool. Professionals rely upon presentations for critical business communication such as influencing audiences and closing deals. Yet, despite their critical role, the process of creating, delivering, and sharing presentations is still based on 25-year-old technology, so most presentations remain static, one-way documents that lack impact.

Collaborating with others around presentations often involves sending large file attachments and comments in email, worrying about whether recipients have the appropriate software to review, and wasting time keeping track of who has the latest version.  And, once a presentation is shared outside your company, it’s impossible to make changes, or even know if someone has viewed it.  The process is frustrating and the result is often miscommunication and lost productivity. Perhaps most importantly, this approach to building and sharing presentations is incompatible with our increasingly mobile business lives.

SlideRocket is built for a new, cloud-centric way of working. Its intuitive, web-based interface allows users to easily assemble rich, dynamic presentations that help captivate an audience whether they’re in the conference room, on a conference call, or in a coffee shop. Individuals can quickly create slides that flow with dynamic data from sources like Google, Twitter, and Salesforce. Author’s charts and graphs are always up-to-date with real-time data from Google spreadsheets, display up to the moment financial information, tap into the instant flow of ideas on twitter, and intelligently assemble sales decks in a single click. People can work as teams to build presentations that take full advantage of the cloud, while analytics provide insight into how presentations are impacting your audience. Most importantly, all SlideRocket presentations are built so audiences can experience them on multiple devices, ranging from desktops to tablets, online or off.

I’m quite enthused about both the product and the great team that is joining VMware. You can read more about this move in SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich’s blog here. Better yet, give it a try at http://www.sliderocket.com.

We’re doing many exciting things at VMware, but I find our efforts in end-user computing to be among the most personally satisfying. These new products are literally offering me a new way to work, a new way that is more productive, convenient, and fun! Today marks a step forward on this journey, and there are many more exciting steps ahead…

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It has been 20 months since VMware acquired SpringSource, launching our entry into the application development space and expanding our capability to “Simplify IT”.  In the development area, we are focusing on simplifying application creation, deployment, and operations via an approach we call open platform-as-a-service, or “Open PaaS”. And over the past year, we have been busily building out this offering via acquisitions and partnerships. 

Today marks a major milestone in our mission with the introduction of Cloud Foundry, the industry’s first open PaaS implementation.  Cloud Foundry provides a PaaS implementation that offers developers what they need… choice:

• choice of developer frameworks,
• choice of application infrastructure services, and
• choice of clouds to which to deploy applications. 

By offering an open architecture in all three dimensions, Cloud Foundry overcomes major limitations found in today’s PaaS solutions.  Nascent industry PaaS offerings are held back by limited or non-standard framework support, lack of variety of application services and especially the inability to deploy applications across both public and private clouds. Let’s explore each in more detail

A Choice of Developer Frameworks

We’ are living in an exciting time for application development frameworks with a Cambrian explosion of new options.  In the past, developers had to choose from the limited number of frameworks large corporations blessed as appropriate for their use.  Today, developers have taken matters in their own hands and are driving incredible innovation in new frameworks.  Furthermore, they are voting with their feet as they flee older development approaches to these higher productivity frameworks. 

Amidst such broad innovation, PaaS solutions that are restricted to a single framework or require non-standard frameworks are simply too limiting.  Because of the breadth of high productivity frameworks being used today, and the likelihood that innovation around frameworks will continue into the future, Cloud Foundry has been designed to support multiple frameworks.  In the initial release, Spring for Java, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js are supported.  The system also supports other JVM-based frameworks such as Grails.

A Choice of Application Services

Just as with the frenzy of innovation occurring around frameworks, a similar phenomenon is happening around application services.  Developers use these data, messaging, and web services as building blocks for their application.  Data management in particular is seeing intense innovation and experimentation as different solutions emerge to handle large scale and highly distributed data problems.  As with frameworks, Cloud Foundry is designed to support a wide variety of application services because there simply is no single solution that meets all application requirements.  Initially, Cloud Foundry supports MySQL, MongoDB and Redis.  In coming months, we will add support for other application services.  We will work with the industry to support popular third party technologies as well as VMware’s own vFabric application services.

A Choice of Clouds: Public and Private, VMware and Non-VMware

A choice of clouds for application deployment is imperative for mainstream adoption of PaaS.  Even if development is significantly more productive, without deployment flexibility the PaaS model is unlikely to see mainstream adoption.  Customers need the flexibility, both today and in the future, to switch between cloud operators.  This choice is critical to avoid lock-in, have the option to deploy applications within the firewall or to deploy in a specific geography.

Cloud Foundry can be deployed in public or private clouds.  It runs on top of vSphere and vCloud infrastructure but can also run on top of other infrastructure clouds.  Our partner RightScale today is demonstrating the deployment of Cloud Foundry on top of Amazon Web Services.  Because of the open architecture, it could also be implemented on top of other infrastructure technologies like Eucalyptus or OpenStack.

Public Clouds: CloudFoundry.com and Partner Clouds

VMware will operate a public cloud PaaS service at www.CloudFoundry.com.  This instance of Cloud Foundry will give developers an easy way to trial Cloud Foundry and provides a test bed for new services and operational optimization of the software.  CloudFoundry.com is in beta and developers can sign up today for an invite.  We will scale the service as quickly as possible.  In the coming months, you will see other public clouds running Cloud Foundry, including existing and new VMware partners. 

Private Clouds

VMware will also offer a commercial version of Cloud Foundry for enterprise customers who want to deploy a PaaS solution on their own clouds.  Cloud Foundry in a private cloud will give IT control over the application environment as well as the ability to integrate with a company’s own portfolio of application services.  The commercial version will support vFabric application services as well as third party services.  And by running on vSphere infrastructure, companies will be able to easily leverage their existing investments in virtual infrastructure.  PaaS can help IT accelerate application delivery and reduce the application backlog.

Honey I Shrank the Cloud: The Micro Cloud

We’ve even shrunk the cloud down to sit on a developer’s laptop.  With the “Micro Cloud”, we have a version of Cloud Foundry that will run in a single virtual machine.  This will allow developers to build and test their applications on their own machine, with the confidence that their production environment is symmetrical to the development environment.  The Micro Cloud configuration of Cloud Foundry will be available later this quarter from CloudFoundry.com.

Open Source?  But Of Course

It is increasingly a prerequisite for modern developer technologies to be available as open source.  This allows developers to inspect, evaluate and modify the software based on their own needs, as well as avoid the risk of lock-in.  Cloud Foundry is an open source project with a community and source code today at www.cloudfoundry.org.  This provides the ultimate in extensibility and allows the community to extend and integrate Cloud Foundry with any framework, application service or infrastructure cloud.  Available under the Apache 2 license, this liberal licensing model encourages a broad-based community of contributors.  While not a Spring project, the Cloud Foundry project will be governed like Spring based on the long and successful history of Spring as an open source project.

Happy Coding 

Each generation of computing brings a new application development platform, and in the cloud era that platform will be delivered as a service.  By leveraging PaaS, developers avoid the many hassles of updating machines and configuring middleware and focus their attention on delivering applications. Reducing these obstacles means faster delivery of applications. Or as one of our own PaaS-using developers has declared,

Developers should write code, not IT trouble tickets.

For more information on Cloud Foundry, please visit CloudFoundry.com where you can request an invitation to the service and get notified when your Micro Cloud is available for download.  For information on the open source project, please visit CloudFoundry.org.  And you can replay the developer webcast at www.vmware.com/go/apr12.