Rethink IT

As the Product Marketing Manager for VMware vCloud Director, I am very excited to announce that as of Monday, August 30, VMware vCloud Director is generally available (GA) to the public. 

This is a groundbreaking product.  The technology under the covers is unabashedly complex, yet the user experience is fantastically simple.  And this is reflective of the very magic underlying the product – the creation of complete logical separation between the consumption of IT services and the delivery and management of the infrastructure that supports them.  IT can give users self-service access to their own isolated “virtual datacenters,” new units of consumption in the cloud that represent pools of compute, storage, and networking resources.   Users deploy into these pools using standardized infrastructure service catalogs through a Flash-based web UI.  On the back-end, IT can manage and architect the datacenter in the most efficient way, without unnecessarily siloed infrastructure. 

In this way, VMware vCloud Director is the first product that truly enables cloud computing in existing datacenters.  While public clouds have a number of great benefits – most notably instant access to on-demand capacity – most of our customers need a solution that provides these same benefits with the security, control, and long-term cost efficiency of their existing datacenter.  And let’s not forget existing applications, hardware investments, people and skills.  For most customers, the most pragmatic path to cloud computing is a dual-pronged approach that includes evolving existing datacenters into private clouds and using public cloud resources where necessary.  In fact, we believe most customers will find that a hybrid environment using both public and private clouds is the best fit. 

And when it comes to hybrid clouds – only VMware provides a clear and pragmatic path.  It’s not enough to say that you have a private cloud and a public cloud - managing this sort of “mixed” cloud might actually be more complex than before.  Instead, VMware's vCloud Director provides a common, consistent platform for both internal private clouds as well as external public clouds.  In our hybrid cloud vision, customers have the ability to migrate workloads between clouds and interact with all clouds through the same set of programmatic interfaces and management tools.  By VMware vCloud Director leveraging open standards such the VMware vCloud^TM API and the Open Virtualization Format (.ovf), and being used by a massive network of over 1,700 VMware vCloud service provider partners, we enabled customers to easily extend their datacenter capacity and manage public cloud capacity as easily as their own private cloud.   And this week, we also launched VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, our solution to ensure customers have access to trusted, secure, and compatible public clouds that are ready for the hybrid cloud.

Over the past few months, I’ve worked with some of our most ambitious customers, building full private clouds on pre-release versions of vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback, vShield Edge, vSphere Enterprise Plus, and vCenter Server.  All of the pilots were successes, and the customers found a number of great uses for the product:

• Enabling the sales force to set up demos of complex software products to customers on the fly
• Consolidating datacenters and vCenter silos onto a shared infrastructure
• Providing developers and researchers a virtual sandbox for their applications
• Segregating and offloading data onto secure public clouds
• Simplifying compliance by standardizing on pre-approved infrastructure and application templates
• Enabling the easy transfer of workloads within an enterprise’s two datacenters
• Transforming a business model away from selling software on managed servers to providing convenient access to centrally hosted resources

Stay tuned on ReThink IT for more discussions on how VMware is leading the way with cloud computing to take the complexity out of IT.  My colleague, Murthy, has been exploring many of these issues around cloud computing and, with his literary acumen, can explain even the most complex technology concept to a pre-schooler.  I encourage you to join the conversation here and on the VMware Communities site for VMware vCloud Director.

And by the way, check out the article in the Wall Street Journal featuring VMware vCloud Director.

Greg