Rethink IT

Today we announced the vCloud Connector plug-in for vSphere. vSphere admins use the vSphere client to monitor and manage VMs running in their vSphere infrastructure. With vCloud Connector, admins can now also monitor and manage VMs running in any vCloud – whether private (internal) or public (external).

vCloud Connector has been in private beta for several months, and customers were excited by the ability to get a single view of all VMs, regardless of where they are running. At VMware, we talk about cloud computing as a way of delivering IT as a service, rather than a place (or destination) where computing is done. vCloud Connector follows this philosophy. As a vSphere administrator, your job is to make sure IT service is being delivered by your cloud, regardless of whether those compute resources are internal or external, on a vSphere host or a private or public cloud.

The feature that most excited beta testers, however, was the ability to automatically transfer VMs between clouds. Administrators can quickly and easily transfer VMs to the best place for them to run – regardless of whether that’s vSphere or a vCloud. Before anyone gets too excited, we’re not talking about transferring running VMs – this is not long-distance vMotion. But it’s a major step forward in the journey to the hybrid cloud. 

Take a private cloud example where vApp 1 is running on vCloud Director in Datacenter A, and you’d like to run a second copy in Datacenter B. Transfer the entire vApp with vCloud Connector to your vCloud in Datacenter B. Now imagine Datacenter B is actually a virtual data center provided by a vCloud service provider like Bluelock, Colt or Verizon. It’s all the same – it just works. If you haven’t gotten your own private cloud running yet, you can still manage and transfer VMs between your vSphere infrastructure and an external vCloud service. vCloud Director is not required inside your datacenter for vCloud Connector to work.

vCloud Connector uses the vCloud API to do its magic in monitoring vClouds and managing transfers between vSphere and any vCloud. This means that any service that provides the full vCloud API v1.0 and OVF upload/download will work – whether that’s an internal vCloud Director deployment, or one at a service provider.

We’re excited about this neat plug-in, and it’ll be available for download for free from the VMware.com website before the end of this quarter.