The Console

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.

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

VMware has now passed the decade mark, and created what is arguably one of the most important brands in software.  In this case, I am simply referring to the name of our company as the brand.  It is incredible how well recognized we are amongst our primary target buyer – the IT audience. 

As we look forward to what we want to accomplish in the next decade, we decided that it was time to pump up the whole essence of the VMware brand.  And in this case, I am referring to the brand identity – the collection of attributes and image that our overall brand experience delivers to our target audiences.  Without going into the science of brand, of which there is plenty of expert and scientific research, I’d like to reflect one simple, country boy view.  (For the record, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, thus the “country boy” reference.  Having spent most of my life in CA, I may or may not be entitled to this reference!)

Our approach to brand is holistic, encompassing the image, voice and tone of VMware, all wrapped around a set of core messages that set up our value proposition.  Thus our starting point was one of energy… “Energize the business through IT, while saving energy – financial, human, and the earth’s.”  (See my blog on “Energize and Save – Standing Out in a Crowd”.)

With that core message defined, we needed the other elements – image and tone – to reflect that message.  Consistency is key.  It all has to re-enforce what we want to get across, and not compromise the essence of who we are, and how we best present ourselves.  This is why we are excited to bring an updated look, tone, and message to market in a cohesive package.

The first thing you’ll notice is that our color palette is considerably more vibrant. We specifically chose a wide range of cool to warm colors in tones that complement each other, in order to give us the flexibility to be creative in our execution. But the differentiating image that manifests itself throughout our creative execution is the use of the color prisms.  A simple idea manifested through our creative execution – VMware solutions simplify the underlying complexity.  For example, in some of our treatments you’ll see a reveal – a corner of a piece pealed back to show the underlying complexity illustrated as a grid of color prisms.  In other words, the surface is simple and clear, but the underlying infrastructure is complex and diverse.

As part of our comprehensive brand redesign, we have also updated our logo.  I will talk about this in more depth in my next post.

Brighter, bolder, more energetic.  That was the goal of the image redesign.  With our rapid growth and expansion, it has been difficult in the past to manage a consistent brand.  But now we are entering a stage of our company lifecycle where increasing the depth of relationship with our customers, partners, and broader ecosystem is critical to our ongoing success.  Where maintaining leadership visibility across multiple audiences will keep us in a position of strength.  This evolution dictates that we become more aware and protective of our complete brand, and thus the perception of VMware everywhere.

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

When a company grows as rapidly as VMware has, you know there is real value being delivered to customers.  One of the challenges we faced at VMware was how best to articulate our core value proposition, when there were just so many great things to talk about.  This was a classic exercise in defining the Point That Matters, the core reason why your customers buy from you.  (The Point That Matters is a phrase I borrow from Zoom Marketing, our trusted partner during this process.)

This exercise was a combination of examining our own internal view of our value proposition, compared to an external view shared by our customers, partners, and industry analysts, all of which were quite familiar with VMware and its solutions.  Through this exercise, we heard some not so surprising things, but with a few twists that really made us think about our positioning. 

For example, most people immediately think of cost savings as the primary benefit of virtualization.  While cost savings is definitely a factor in driving organizations to initiate a virtualization journey, it was not the pinnacle of value that was obtained.  In fact, those customers that had pursued more aggressive virtualization adoption were most excited by the achievement of flexibility within their IT environments, leading to significantly reduced management time, and dramatic improvements in their responsiveness to business.  In short, they were achieving IT agility, and in turn helping fuel business agility. 

When asked to rank statements related to our value proposition, both customers and prospects believed that the core value proposition was around the duality of achieving a dynamic, and flexible IT environment, while at the same time reducing costs.  This was something they believed to be unique to VMware.  Most importantly, they believed that this was the correct order as well – flexibility over cost savings.  Frankly, we knew this was a benefit, but have traditionally always led with our cost savings message. 

The other important thing we heard is how achieving flexibility and agility within IT really does put IT in a position to better serve the business – to respond to change and opportunity that can fuel growth.  In essence, they were better positioned to be a strategic partner to the business. 

The problem now was how to articulate a core set of messages around this point that matters, that doesn’t sound like every other IT vendor.  Take a quick browse around some websites, and you’ll find a common theme – everyone seems to promise dynamic, flexible, adaptive, on-demand, solutions for IT.  Hmmm. 

One of the things that stood out to Zoom Marketing during this process was how energetic VMware’s employees, customers and partners were.  During interviews that should typically last 30 minutes, our ecosystem wanted to keep on talking, typically an hour or more.  There was true excitement about the value they were seeing, and in the promise of VMware’s vision for bridging existing IT environments into the era of cloud computing.  This gave us an idea, a way to encapsulate the value proposition of our solutions, with the value that an agile IT environment provides to the business:

Energize the business through IT, while saving energy – financial, human and the earth’s.

The whole point of IT is to fuel the business.  So the whole point of achieving a more dynamic and flexible IT infrastructure is to be more adept at fueling that business, or as we like to say, energizing the business.  But the duality of our core value proposition cannot be ignored.  Our customers talk about real savings, in 3 categories:

• Optimizing Financial Energy – doing more with less.  Significant capex savings. Greater efficiencies in server, storage and networking. Saving financial resources to apply to the needs of the business.

• Shifting Human Energy – shift from serving hardware, to serving the business.  Dramatic reduction in manual tasks, and management time.  Simplified operations, supplemented with automation.

• Saving Earth’s Energy – using less, and using it more wisely.  Doing their part to reduce energy consumption and their respective carbon footprint.

The words are ours, the sentiment belongs to our customers.  What a great opportunity to learn from them, and be in a position to echo their sentiment.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

This week HP introduced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which is appropriately described as “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.” This blueprint unlocks currently siloed datacenter resources (including compute, storage and network components) and, with the help of virtualization, integrates them into a pool of very fluid resources that can be smartly and safely allocated to the applications running on top.

Put another way, HP has unveiled a template that helps customers easily build what many are now calling a “private cloud.” The general idea of a private cloud is to bring many of the good traits associated with today’s public cloud vendors (e.g. elasticity, efficiency, self-service, and usage-based resource charges) to a company-owned and operated datacenter—where IT is often more comfortable with their ability to meet performance, availability, and compliance requirements.

VMware vSphere™ was explicitly designed for building the private cloud, and HP BladeSystem Matrix’s out-of-box experience and well-integrated management will help customers more quickly and more easily realize the full capabilities of VMware vSphere. What’s more, even as customers reap the benefits of their private cloud, they’re also laying the foundation to leveraging public cloud resources. Virtual machines are well-encapsulated and largely location independent. Working with HP, we can offer tools and a complete portfolio of services that help customers continue to maintain the control and security they have in their datacenters as they begin to leverage resources in the public cloud. The resulting “hybrid” cloud is depicted below.

Infrastructure and application management in this new world is incredibly important, too, and HP’s capabilities integrate quite well with VMware vCenter™ to push the envelope on this front. I particularly like the integration work HP has done to bring their Insight software capabilities into VMware vCenter. You have to register to see it, but there’s a great demonstration of this at minute 62 of the VMworld 2009 general session.

I’ll stop here in the interest of keeping this blog short, but I did just want to highlight again the excitement I have over holistic solutions built for the fully virtualized datacenter that help enable the promise of the private cloud.  If you would like to see and hear a lot more about VMware and HP’s Converged Infrastructure, be sure to also check out the video from Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s VP of Server Product Marketing.

Posted by Scott Davis
VMware View Chief Technology Officer
cross-posted from Scott's new blog: VMware View-Point

Welcome to VMware View-Point, our Desktop Office of the CTO Blog.  My name is Scott Davis and  I’ve recently moved over to our Desktop BU as our overall CTO.

So, who is this guy and what does he know about desktop computing and virtualization?

Besides being an expert in operating systems, storage, virtualization and enterprise IT, I’m also an entrepreneur at heart and I am very excited about the opportunity in front of us; using virtualization insights and technologies to create a far better and richer experience around client computing for both end users and the IT staff that administers the infrastructure. The opportunity to change the world is what gets me up in the morning and that’s what I see when I look at the state of client computing and the palette of technologies VMware and our partners are bringing to it.

When I tell folks about my new role, a question I get asked is “What does virtualization really mean for client or desktop systems?” Well, virtualization is powerful for ALL forms of computing, from the desktop to the data center and the cloud. Virtualization is fundamentally about encapsulation and isolation between layers. It’s about explicitly severing all dependencies between an application and the various software and hardware components necessary to perform the specific task – so that every layer is isolated and can be provisioned, managed, updated and secured independently. By layers here I mean my applications, my data, my user settings or profile, the operating system, middleware and the actual physical devices in use. In other words,  enabling these components on either side to have independence from each other and to evolve separately. The power of virtualization comes from this fundamental tenet - separating the work to be done from the dependence on specific hardware and software that does the work. However, it’s really a building block. And customers don’t buy cool building blocks, they buy solutions to real world business problems. And solutions are comprised of applying the right building blocks in the right way to real world problems. By virtualizing and centrally managing these different layers, end users get the flexibility and freedom they desire while desktop IT admins get a cost effective, secure way to manage the desktop infrastructure. And in the server world, it’s had incredible impact; this notion of encapsulating a workload into a file and moving it around live with the ease of copying a file – Consolidation, Business Continuity, Rapid Provisioning, Data Center Automation, Disaster Recovery, and ultimately Flexibility are just a few of these solutions. 

Ok, you've said enough for me to read the next paragraph. What's your vision of the desktop?

Diversity is growing. We have more client device types – thin clients, thick clients, mobile laptops, smartphones. We have more operating systems, look at the excitement generated by the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android operating systems, Mac OS, Linux and even the new Google Chrome OS designed for Web 2.0 applications. An explosion of new applications is occurring as well. Look at the plethora of iPhone/iPod Touch apps – a platform than didn’t exist a few short years ago. And we all use many of these technologies not just for fun, but to get our work done. Enterprise IT, on the other hand, needs to guarantee service levels (which has been historically more difficult for desktop), protect the company’s assets, provide security, and of course manage everything. And provide all the applications that everyone needs to accomplish their jobs. And by the way, do it all cost effectively! How to reconcile these vastly different and conflicting demands? This is a different climate than server
computing…

VMware’s vision for client or desktop computing is to use virtualization technologies to encapsulate and isolate all the aspects of the desktop. Make each aspect independently manageable, duplicate-able, recreate-able.  Employee-Owned IT? Separate into different virtual machines. Lost, broken or obsolete device? Throw it away, the VM is preserved in the data center and can be redeployed at will. 

I want the freedom that comes with complete separation between my physical devices and all my software. I want device independence; my applications, my data, my personality dynamically composited and encapsulated executing on the optimal device(s) for my  current time and location.  That may mean collocating layers on the same device or distributing across multiple systems. I want isolation; my personal and professional applications, run-time and data isolated and encapsulated, accessible via the internet, mobile devices, thin and thick clients. With client virtualization I want the display, the computes and the storage intelligently and automatically placed – sometimes its’ better to execute the workload in the data center and virtualize the graphics to a client. Other times, I want to take the whole workload with me and run it on a laptop. Or something in between. And why stop there? We’re also doing best of breed virtualization for isolation and encapsulation between all relevant boundaries – that’s why we have ThinApp for application virtualization and continue to invest in advancing that technology. And why we announced at VMworld our relationship with RTO to make use of their profile caching and replication technology in our solutions. And why we partner with Teradici to jointly bring solutions to market based on the best in class remote graphics protocol designed explicitly for virtualized desktops.  And there’s a lot more coming!

User-Centric Computing; a powerful vision and architecture…

User-Centric Computing is the term we at VMware have coined to describe this  desktop vision - the intersection of our virtualization technologies, management platform and the demands of client computing. This model is facilitated by composited client virtual machines; the desktop VM is not monolithic but created out of multiple component parts, but the result is itself also an encapsulated object, a VM. Each of these component parts are also isolated and may be independently managed and maintained. Client virtualization is about creating an encapsulated virtual machine that represents a user’s desktop out of a collection of independently virtualized parts – Base OS, Virtualized applications, User data files, User profile and settings, virtualized hardware such as graphics and storage. And these parts are dynamically brought together to form the complete desktop VM image. Each layer is independent and isolated from the others. And preserved. And when we execute such a client VM, we may span-machine/device boundaries during its execution.  

VMware is committed to this vision and best of breed technologies at every layer:

• Platform –  VMware vSphere, the upcoming CVP client hypervisor and the world-class common Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that they both share.

• Composition and Management – View Composer for image management, VMware vCenter Suite for virtualized data center management, desktop View Manager for Virtualized Client management, ThinApp our application virtualization  engine, etc.

• >TRUE User Experience – The ground breaking Teradici PCoIP graphics protocol designed explicitly for virtualized desktops over LAN and WAN, as well as our investments in diverse mobile devices and providing an offline experience.

In future blogs, I ‘ll be delving into each of these technologies in depth and many additional topics. We’re just beginning on this journey together.

And a few final remarks…

I hope you’re as excited as I am and that I’ve given you a taste of our vision and what’s to come. The solutions we bring to market based on virtualization technologies will be revolutionary for the desktop computing experience.  Decoupling and managing desktops independently from physical end point devices. And with the Windows 7 refresh looming, this is the ideal time to make the break to virtualized clients. Rapid provisioning, desktop style. Replacing obsolete or lost devices. Painlessly. Upgrading any individual component part, be it hardware or software, without down time or outage. Reduced Complexity. Desktops have gotten burdened with greater and greater complexity, as anyone trying to figure out why their Windows system runs slower and slower will attest. Hey, I’ve built operating systems software and even I get stuck! Using virtualization to optimize and distribute portions of desktops across the optimal hardware to run them at the right time.  Manage and preserve desktop images in the data center – If my client workload is encapsulated as a file through virtualization, then my data center infrastructure can be used to manage, preserve and secure it. Irrespective of the physical device I might be using at the moment.  Rapid provisioning and business continuity, linchpin attributes of virtualization brought to the desktop world. Except instead of rapidly provisioning a new server instance to handle the load, for the desktop its replacing a lost, broken or tolen device without any loss of data or productivity. Or it’s optimizing my experience based on local resources. The right amount of physical hardware, applied to the virtual desktop when its needed.

As has been proven for servers, virtual desktops are really better than physical ones. And that’s our viewpoint!

Follow Scott on Twitter as @shd_9 and Scott and his team on their new blog, VMware View-Point.

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

You may have seen the announcement about the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform in November 2008 or the MVP demo in Steve Herrod’s Future of Virtualization keynote at VMworld Europe 2009 and wondered what we were doing in this space, given our heritage in virtualizing x86 systems – desktops and servers.  I wanted to share our thoughts and vision for mobile phones to explain why we entered this space and what we intend to do.

Why Mobile Phones?

Mobile phones - then and now ... (source: Freefoto.com)

Mobile phones are fundamentally and rapidly changing in many ways.  If you think about your mobile phone from 5-7 years ago, it was primarily a communication device that allowed you to save telephone numbers.  Now compare that with the mobile phone you have now (well, this exercise is only for those of us who have a smart phone…)  You can now check your emails, browse the internet, play games, watch TV/videos, listen to music and many other things from your mobile device.  Today’s mobile phones are computational devices, not mere communication devices.  They really are a small computer in your hand; the next generation PC!  In some cases, you can do more things on your mobile phone now – GPS technology has allowed developers to bring forth a vibrant set of LBS-type applications that are very useful and cool.  Mobile payment applications are another category that is catching on as well…

If you think about mobile phones as the next-generation PC, it is only reasonable to expect all the good and bad things about PCs to be relevant on mobile phones, if they aren’t already.  Some of the good things include a huge collection of applications; more powerful devices with more CPU horse power, more memory and better graphics capabilities that allow you to watch videos/TV, play better games, etc.  Some of the bad things include security of the device and headaches in managing devices that are more mobile than laptops.

We formulated a three-prong strategy that allows us to bring innovative solutions in this new market.

1. More applications:  RIM’s BlackBerry got us all hooked on checking emails from mobile phone and for the longest time, emails were the killer application for mobile phones.  Apple has since shown that if it is easy to develop and get applications, developers will build mobile applications and consumers will download them.  Now consumers are downloading all kinds of applications onto their mobile phones.  As I was thinking about my usage pattern, I realized that there are some applications that I use more on my iPhone than on my Mac – the Facebook app is one example.  I still use the application on my laptop but I find that I can do many of the common things from my iPhone and it is more accessible.  The second thing that I realized is that there is tremendous innovation in the consumer space that eventually gets rolled into the enterprise when us old geezers finally “get it.”

   
   

   You may be thinking, ‘yeah, ok, but what does that mean for me?’  Let’s say you are out at your kid’s soccer game and receive a call that a server is down.  Instead of rushing to find the nearest PC, what if you can restart the server from your mobile phone?  We believe enterprises will like that type of flexibility to perform some operations irrespective of where you are.  To that end, we recently launched a technology preview for VMware vCenter Mobile Access.  vCMA will allow you to monitor and manage parts of your internal cloud.  Over time we will figure out what other parts of vCenter and other products need to have a mobile phone interface.

   To download vCMA, visit: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess.  Also, the vCMA team has a VMworld session on this topic so if you are attending VMworld in SF later this month, please attend this session.

2. Accessing your desktop:  We are getting a lot of traction for our VDI initiative that allows enterprises to completely redefine how they think about deploying and managing PCs.  Users really care about a set of applications and data and not very much about the particular device they need to use to be productive.  IT folks want to effectively and efficiently manage these applications and data that their “customers” depend on.  By virtualizing the desktop and running that in the cloud, users can now access their desktop from a desktop, laptop or a thin-client device.  Under the VMware View umbrella of products, we are releasing a great set of functionality that allows IT to manage these virtualized desktops.

   Most mobile phones now have WiFi capabilities and with the data networks getting faster and faster with 4G and WiMax deployments starting up, we believe mobile phones will become the next generation thin clients.  Imagine connecting your phone into a monitor and keyboard to access your desktop running in the cloud.  We believe this will take mobility and accessibility to the next level.  We realize that there are a few usability issues and technological shortcomings that need to be addressed and expect that they will be either by us or our partners.  As you think about your desktop strategy, you should incorporate some thoughts about this model.

3. Virtualized phones: Most everyone who first hears about mobile virtualization scratches their head wondering why you need virtualization on a mobile phone.  If I had a dime for every time people asked me for the elevator pitch on this, I definitely wouldn’t need to work for a few years.  While there are many benefits across the value chain all the way from the semiconductor vendors to handset OEMs to carriers to enterprises to consumers, I want to focus on the enterprise use case in this note.

   There are two major trends in enterprises when it comes to mobile phones.  First, more and more enterprises are purchasing and giving out mobile phones to more and more employees because the productivity benefits associated with this move are well understood.  Second, more and more employees already have a very cool and capable personal phone and wonder why they cannot simply use that device instead of getting a second device from IT.  Due to security concerns, IT has traditionally not allowed employee-owned devices to connect to or manage corporate resources so the unfortunate implication is that a good number of employees carry two phones.  If accessing your email and calendar is the only thing you want to do from a mobile phone, this isn’t much of a problem since Active Sync provides some basic management capabilities but we are seeing an increasing trend where many enterprises applications are being ported to mobile phones.  See point 1 above about vCMA.  You certainly don’t want your IT folks managing your datacenter from their personal mobile phone, do you?  When you start thinking about doing more than just email, you will realize that the security concerns of allowing employee-owned devices are legitimate.  This is where virtualization will play a key role.

   Mobile virtualization is like server virtualization in that it allows you to run multiple isolated virtual environments on a single device.  With server virtualization, you run multiple server or desktop workloads in virtual machines on a singe physical server.  With mobile virtualization, you run multiple virtual phones on a single device i.e. you run your home and work phones on a single phone in two isolated containers with completely separate identities – two telephone numbers, two contact lists, two calendars, two sets of applications, two set of rules/policies, two bills for telephone and data charges, etc.  There is a clear separation of church and state or in this case, home and work on your device.

   The benefit is that employees can now use a device they already own while IT can efficiently manage the “work phone” running on this device.  You can see some early demos of this at:
   
   

   The MVP team has a session on this topic at VMworld so please attend this session to find out more details.

I hope this gives you a bit of insight into what we are up to.  Your feedback is most welcome.  Also, I will blog more on each of these initiatives in the future so look out for more information.

One final thought: VMworld 2009 is right around the corner in beautiful San Francisco, CA from August 31 until September 3rd.  The track owners told me that the sessions will be great and having attended a few meetings about keynotes, I can assure you that you will like both Paul’s and Steve’s keynotes.  More than anything else, VMworld is a great opportunity for you to network with your peers and VMware employees, and see what else is happening in the virtualization ecosystem.  If you haven’t registered yet, do it now!  You won’t regret it!  Hope to see you there.  Happy Summer!

[Follow Srinivas on Twitter at skrishna09]

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

Hi Everyone,

I’m extremely excited to announce VMware’s intention to acquire SpringSource, a 5 year-old company rapidly becoming a leader in enterprise and web application development and management. The goal of this blog is to explain the complementary benefits of this merger to longtime VMware fans as well as to the vibrant Spring community who may know less about us. First, a quick introduction to SpringSource…

SpringSource began as the commercial development team leading the innovative Spring portfolio of open source projects, an effort focused on providing a simpler, lighter-weight alternative to the Java EE (J2EE) standard. Led by Rod Johnson (author, enterprise java authority, and SpringSource CEO), Spring has become the de facto standard programming model for modern enterprise Java, rich web, and enterprise integration applications. Over the last couple of years, SpringSource has expanded their purview across an even broader range of offerings, employing the thought leaders within the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities.

A Common Mission: Simplify IT

Since our founding 11 years ago, VMware has focused on simplifying IT; removing the rigidity baked into today’s desktop and datacenter infrastructure to save on capital and operating expenses while simultaneously allowing enterprises to move faster towards their business needs. Companies typically spend 70% of their IT budgets just on keeping their datacenters going… replacing failed components, troubleshooting outages, repelling security attacks, and doing other tasks that are focused on keeping the lights on. Our mission (and in fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the spending of this 70% budget towards activities that move the business forward… creating new applications that generate revenue, make them more competitive, or just improve the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4. This is our datacenter offering that simplifies IT by severing the tentacles that unnaturally tie software to hardware and reaping the encapsulation, flexibility, and automation benefits that follow. [For those of you new to vSphere and its goals, we have a (somewhat marketing-y) overview video here.]

SpringSource has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of complexity. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas… high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed applications. SpringSource summarizes this mission with the following picture:

This shared mission is what brought us together in initial partnering efforts late last year. As a combined entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we’ll also work to jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles… the ones that unnaturally tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed.

How do VMware and SpringSource intersect?

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running..

Developer frameworks already separate out a lot of the hardware and software infrastructure requirements from the application code itself, and we’ll focus on building on and extending these capabilities. For example, 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.

The above is a fairly naïve and simplified example, but hopefully it gives you a flavor for where these combined efforts can go. And we absolutely must go on this journey with a continued emphasis on openness and in delivering value in an evolutionary way.

Choice

VMware has always emphasized choice; choice in which operating systems you leverage, which applications you run, and which hardware you run VMware products on. We’ve also proactively pushed on industry standards (such as OVF) that make it easier to choose non-VMware virtualization solutions if so desired. This openness is good on several fronts:

• customers will more aggressively pursue solutions that don’t restrict their future options,
• it enables and accelerates competition, which pushes vendors to continuously innovate and add value, and
• it enables a more evolutionary path to reaching end goals versus requiring complete infrastructure or application rebuilds.

As we bring application-related assets into VMware, we know that we must double-down on our focus on openness and choice. We want to enable all applications, both existing and new, to reap the full benefits of running on vSphere, and we will make the same virtualization and management layer interfaces available to other application frameworks and middleware components. We have early efforts underway around .Net, PhP, Ruby, and J2EE, and will continue to focus on expanding these as well as newcomers in the rapidly evolving development world. This picture attempts to show how this all comes together around vSphere:

Furthermore, we will continue our openness at the vSphere management layer, making the interfaces to the applications and infrastructure easily available for non-VMware management tools to access and interact with.

SpringSource also has a huge focus on openness and choice. SpringSource employees are stewards of Spring, Tomcat, Hyperic, and their other offerings, but their respective successes are the result of the vibrant communities that have grown up around them. Furthermore, this space is characterized by customers who wish to pick and choose which of these components they want to use and easily blend them together with other IDEs, programming methodologies, application servers, and management tools.

Let me be absolutely clear on this… our commitment to openness will continue and even grow.  And In particular, the Spring framework will continue to be as open and portable as ever. We’ll continue to target it at non-SpringSource middleware and management tools, and we will also continue to enable and support deployment on non-VMware virtualization offerings and even (gasp!) physical hardware. Rod Johnson himself will make the decisions as to where Spring goes and how it remains as open as it is today.

On a personal note, I’m as excited about the community aspects of SpringSource’s offerings as the opportunity to work with Rod Johnson and the other smart people and cool technologies at SpringSource. I believe many of the existing VMware products will benefit from the lessons of openness and community-building that SpringSource has learned.

And what about the whole “cloud” thing?

This openness, and in fact the complementary nature of what our two companies are doing, makes even more sense in the context of cloud computing. We have spent a lot of time discussing our views of cloud computing and launched the vCloud Initiative to realize this vision (more detailed videos and slide shows are available here and here). Our approach to the cloud is threefold:

1. Deliver software to the enterprise that brings the salient traits of cloud computing to their on-premise datacenters. These traits include resource elasticity, simplicity at scale, self-service portals, and the option of charging internal customers based on their resource usage. Building the “internal cloud” has been the focus of our vSphere and vCenter product lines.

2. Offer software to hosters, service providers, telcos, outsourcers, and other owners of external datacenters that lets them offer computational capabilities to the enterprise. We base this software offering on vSphere and vCenter as well, and the beauty of this approach is that it is compatible with what companies are doing within their own datacenters. VMs are completely portable to these “external clouds”, and they’ll get the same levels of availability and performance guarantees when they run them here. This is the focus of our VMware Service Provider Partner Program.

3. Connect internal and external datacenters together to create what is increasingly referred to as the “private cloud”. We are working with our partners to connect the internal and external clouds on a number of fronts such as how to migrate applications to and from the datacenters and a common management view of application assets regardless of where they’re running. In this way, we hope to provide an evolutionary path for companies to leverage externally provided datacenters on their own terms and as they’re comfortable with compliance, security, SLAs, data placement, or other concerns facing their business.

This is the canonical picture we use to illustrate the vCloud initiative:

So why did I just babble on about this? The key is in how SpringSource and other application frameworks enable and support this same view of the world as virtualization, modern application frameworks, and cloud computing converge.

PaaS with choice

Our common goal is for developers to easily build their applications and move from coding to production execution as seamlessly as possible… regardless of whether they will be deployed to a small internal datacenter for limited use or to a completely external cloud provider for much larger scale audiences (and the hopes of achieving Facebook application stardom!). This end state has a lot in common with what is today referred to as “platform as a service” (abbreviated PaaS). Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today.

PaaS simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running, and managing applications. As we see it, the key characteristics of PaaS are:

1. Elasticity: automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the application
2. Multi-tenancy: being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared infrastructure
3. Simplified provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets installed and deployed
4. Self-service: allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their typical IT service request processes.
5. Rapid development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during the development and test phases
6. Simplified (or invisible) management: PaaS offerings typically have built-in application availability and performance management

With vSphere, we are providing the elasticity, multi-tenancy, and simplified provisioning traits. On the self-service front, we are aggressively extending our VMware Lab Manager product to be a more general self-service portal for both internal and external clouds. And when we combine vSphere with the Spring framework, Spring runtime components, and Hyperic management capabilities, we add rapid development models and simplified management to the mix.

One key difference between our offerings and existing offerings will be centered on choice. By severing the tentacles that today tie what you want to run to where you want to run it, VMware can provide the benefits of PaaS, but with significantly more customer choices. Combined SpringSource/VMware PaaS offering can be hosted at customer datacenters or at external service providers. For example, customers can achieve many of the efficiencies and developer productivity gains of PaaS without requiring the applications to be run outside of their walls. Today’s PaaS offerings often force you to simultaneously commit to both a programming model and to a vendor who will host the applications written to this model. With VMware’s strategy, any vendor in the vCloud ecosystem will be able to offer a SpringSource-based PaaS offering, allowing customers to select the partner that best suits their changing needs.

And one last point on openness of relevance here. SpringSource will continue to seek out and embrace other virtualization and cloud offerings that suit their customers and development community. Likewise, we will focus on extending the above goals and capabilities to non-SpringSource development frameworks. It certainly makes engineering work trickier, but maintaining choice is an absolute requirement these days as VMware continues the quest to simplify IT.

So pull it all together and what do you have… a morphing of our two canonical pictures :-).

In verbal form, our shared vision is smarter infrastructure in which the virtualization platform collaborates with application framework, server and management software to ensure optimal efficiency and resilience. And we will do this regardless of whether you run these applications inside or outside of your datacenter.

And what’s next?

Whew… I’ve well exceeded the amount one should attempt to squeeze into a single blog entry. There’s a lot more to talk about, and you’ll see the combined vision and deliverables further gel in the coming weeks. I’ll close with a shameless plug for VMworld where we’ll share additional details and show some demonstrations of how SpringSource and VMware can work together to simplify IT.

Thanks for reading this, and here’s to an exciting future!

Steve

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

With the launch of VMware vSphere™ 4 and the free VMware OVF Tool 1.0 this month, we have implemented support for the DMTF OVF 1.0 specification across a broad range of VMware products. The VMware vSphere 4 products, VMware vCenter™ 4 and VMware ESX 4, have built-in OVF support at both the API level and directly in the VMware vSphere Client. The stand-alone VMware OVF Tool 1.0 brings OVF 1.0 support to VMware Workstation, VMware Server 2.0, and earlier versions of VMware vCenter and ESX.

As part of the VMware vSphere launch, we are also making many of our products available as OVF packages, so they are readily available to deploy onto your data center infrastructure or your desktop. These products include the VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), VMware Studio 1.0, the technology previews of VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA), VMware vCenter Server 2.5 on Linux, and VMware vCenter Admin Portal.

VMware has been actively involved in the development of the OVF specification since the beginning (the initial draft specification was submitted by VMware, Dell, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource to DMTF in September 2007), and our first product to ship with OVF support was VMware vCenter 2.5 and VMware ESX 3.5 (February 2008). The OVF support in those products was based on the preliminary 0.9 specification and did not cover all aspects of the specification. Essentially, it was limited to import/export for single VM packages. With the release of VMware vSphere 4.0, we support the DMTF OVF 1.0 standard in full, which adds a significant set of new features:

• Support for importing and exporting multi-VM OVF packages (vApps)
• Support for the OVF environment and OVF properties (deployment time software customization)
• Support for the OVA format (distribute your packages as a single file)
• Support for advanced disk compression using delta-disk hierarchies (smaller packages)
• Support for automatic IP allocation and customizable URL links in the VMware vSphere client. (never need to go to the VM console anymore when installing a virtual appliance)
• Backwards compatible with OVF packages generated by earlier products (ready to use)

On the VMware vApp Developer blog, the engineering team behind OVF will start to dig into the details about all these new features and how they can be put to practical use - both by IT administrators and virtual appliance authors. So if you are wondering about the technical details and how to apply OVF in practice, that is a good place to go to learn more.

VMware is pleased to be a part of the newly announced DMTF Virtualization Management (VMAN) Forum. The group will promote interoperability between products that support the VMAN standards. The forum will develop and conduct programs to determine specification conformance in the areas of system virtualization management, virtual system management, and the open virtualization format.

We believe that OVF is an important standard to enable interoperability as well as increasing capabilities while greatly reducing the time for customers to deploy new applications and services.

[Update 2: Updated the blog link to point to the new VMware vApp Developer blog.]

[Update 1: Clarified first sentence: a technology preview of the VMware OVF Tool was released last year, but version 1.0 of the tool was released this month on May 21.]

Posted by Dan Chu
Vice President, Emerging Products and Markets

All clouds are not created equal.  Google recently posted a blog entitled “What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing” which outlines what Google perceives as advantages to its approach to cloud.  While VMware agrees that a major part of future enterprise architectures will reside in the cloud, we differ greatly on our approach.

To save everyone the time and energy, the summary of their post is essentially that Google uses cheap hardware that they expect to fail and smart software to build the equivalent of a giant computer, that Google AppEngine can deliver the cloud for traditional IT, and that the Google model can produce the fastest innovation for end customers. 

Google has a valid and interesting model but we are finding that it simply doesn’t work for the vast of majority of business IT.  Let’s address the issues individually:

1. Building the Giant Computer

Google says that they take “a large set of low cost commodity systems and [tie] them together into one large supercomputer” with their software.  Fundamentally, we agree with this approach as we have done exactly this for thousands of customers over the last 10 years.  Using virtualization, VMware’s solutions have become the de-facto standard for customers looking to improve the efficiency of their datacenters while saving costs.

Over 130,000 customers run VMware and over 55% of VMware datacenter customers have standardized on the VMware platform.  Companies like Lockheed Martin and GE are building their own internal clouds using VMware.

While we are aligned on the overall direction, the Google blog claims that their scale and approach of managing servers lends a key advantage.  If companies had unlimited resources and were able to build massive datacenters with all of these commodity servers, the Google model may be the way to go.  However, this isn’t the picture of most datacenters today.  What virtualization is able to provide is improved performance of applications, improved utilization of existing resources and nearly unlimited scalability. And VMware offers what many customers require—choice. In fact, more than 500 service providers including major global players like  AT&T, Savvis and Terremark offer VMware as their platform to deliver services.  In a recent survey of top global managed service providers, every one of the top ten ran on VMware.

The VMware vision is to enable customers to run the giant computer through software on top of standard hardware, to be able to choose seamlessly to either run in their internal cloud or in an external service provider cloud, and to provide connectivity and consistent manageability between the two.    

2. Leveraging an Enterprise-class Cloud

Google follows up by promoting its AppEngine stack as the way to deliver capacity and scaling for applications and databases, “to deliver the set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model.”

This sounds good, until you run into the issue of trying to run your core applications on AppEngine.  Customers are looking to match their IT platform to their business needs, not the inverse. The Google approach calls for a least common denominator set of non integrated cloud services that everyone squeezes into. Customers want the flexibility and breadth of solutions that exist today along with the efficiency of the cloud.   Customers are not about to re-write or modify their applications so that they can run in a specific cloud.  In particular, given current macro-economic circumstances, customers have a high priority for a cloud platform that can take their existing apps, and enable them to take advantage of the cloud.  

Finally, customers want advanced business continuity, availability, and management capabilities for production, enabled by such technologies as VMotion, High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Storage VMotion, and SRM.  Today customers are broadly using these capabilities and VMware’s service provider partners are also delivering these as a service.  For example, T-Systems has built a solution practice and large customer footprint for running SAP implementations in their VMware-based cloud.

The Google blog further suggests that “there is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine” and that customers should just use Gmail.  Enterprises aren’t going to move off an enterprise class mail platform for a personal-use platform.  To take Exchange as an example, it represents the kind of business-critical core IT application that is what customers want running on VMware today.   It is consistently one of our top several workloads being run on VMware, and we have invested in a lot in ongoing performance work with Exchange. In fact, IBM has demonstrated industry-leading capacity of Exchange mailboxes where customers can scale Exchange greater horizontally with VMware than natively on regular hardware.  

3. Innovating with Cloud

The Google blog closes by asserting that “IT systems are typically slow to evolve,” and that Google is much faster to innovate.   This supposition is mostly focused on Google Apps and its pace for new feature rollout.  This is fine for customers who are looking for exactly the features that Google happens to be working on, but for any other IT needs that a customer might have, the Google stack is a black box to the customer without the component architecture that lets many different types of partners integrate and contribute their new technologies.  In contrast, VMware embraces and extends the entire X86 ecosystem of thousands of ISV’s along with hundreds of service providers to bring the cloud to customers on their own terms. There is nothing like that for Google’s cloud.   

Summary

For customers looking to maintain the flexibility to move back and forth between the external cloud and internal IT, Google’s proprietary platform is like the “Hotel California or the roach motel” where your apps go in, but they never come out.  

VMware provides choice—allowing customers to put new and existing applications where they want, when they want.   So in a nutshell, if you’re a business of pretty much any size and want to consume cloud services, there are options that allow you more flexibility, reliability, compatibility and mobility. 

And if you’re already a VMware user, leverage what you know about the reliability and compatibility of VMware VMs to run the cloud internally or with cloud providers worldwide like SunGard, T-Systems, Tata Communications, and many more. With VMware, the cloud isn’t something “out there” as simply a destination to get to; it’s a new “state of IT” that can also come to you.

Dan Chu is vice president of Emerging Products and Markets for VMware.  He leads VMware’s efforts in the areas of small and medium business, virtual appliances, and cloud computing.

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

After last week’s exciting VMware announcements around the first cloud OS VMware vSphere 4, this week we have additional important news around the announcement of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Cloud Incubator. As President of the DMTF I see this as an important activity at this point in the evolution of this technology as it has begun to revolutionize IT infrastructure. This group plans to tackle several key issues as it relates to the interoperability of cloud management. 

It is probably a good idea at this point to describe what an incubator is and why it is different from a regular work group. I think the best way to describe this is to say that the incubator is really a place for ideas to be developed or incubate before specifications are created. A while back, the DMTF wanted to encourage groups who were in the early stages of developing technology to come to the DMTF and use the existing tools and policies for the rapid development. So to that end, the DMTF borrowed a model used by several member companies and many industry standards organization and created a new DMTF initiative called an incubator. The intent of an incubator is to develop recommendations and draft specifications which will then be taken through the traditional standardization process. The hope was to encourage organizations and members to bring their ideas, even in an early stage, to the DMTF.

The other difference between an incubator and a traditional work group is that it has a leadership board that is comprised of the key stakeholders in the creation of the work. This organization at launch has 13 leadership board companies including VMware, in addition to many other participating companies. We hope others will join the activity and other companies may be added to the leadership board over time. 

From the charter posted on the DMTF site, this incubator plans to:

• Enable the use of cloud computing within enterprises and improve the interoperability between cloud platforms via open cloud resource management standards.
• Increase awareness and support by management systems vendors that develop products to manage cloud resources.
• Enable cloud service portability.
• Provide management consistency cross cloud and enterprise platforms.

One of the important activities of this incubator will be to develop recommendations for enhancements and extensions to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) that may be needed for cloud computing. There has been quite a bit of discussion from me and others on how this may be an important building block for cloud interoperability. The incubator will be a good place for the industry to have those discussions and make agreed upon recommendations. The other two important aspects of this incubator will be around cloud APIs, particularly as they relate to management as well as looking at security models and methods to support this level of cloud interoperability.

VMware is pleased to be a part of this activity and hopes to help enable new levels of interoperability and choice for our customers.