VMTN Blog

Join us today, Wednesday, October 22, at noon PDT (3pm EDT / 8pm BST) on the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast with William Shelton talking about vCloud. Listen live or call in, or catch it on iTunes later.

Link: vCloud: VMware adapts to cloud computing - O'Reilly Broadcast.

I talked on the phone this week to William Shelton, Director of Cloud Computing and Virtual Appliances at VMware. He described an evolution from bundling virtual machines to bundling virtual appliances (which can easily be copied and redeployed in order to handle fail-over or clustering) and now to virtual applications or "VApps." The VApp is the basis for making easier use of clouds.

A VApp can contain several virtual machines, so that you can bundle a cluster of database servers with a front-end web server and a reverse proxy and move them all into a cloud. Each participating cloud vendor will support the RESTful API that lets you insert and extract a VApp.

But VMware doesn't just want to streamline what cloud vendors already do; they want to add value. They're doing this through tools called Cloud vServices. Two such tools mentioned by Shelton are a charge-back system, which lets a cloud bill a customer in a standardized way, and an SLA tracking tool that I predict will be much appreciated.

VMware's Greg Lato went to Cloud Camp and noted we have to make sure which cloud we're talking about. Link: Notes from Camping in the Clouds | latoga labs.

One of the most interesting aspects I took away from the night is the split between the Web 2.0 Cloud and the Enerterprise Cloud.  The Web 2.0 Cloud is the all the classic cloud services that you think of when you say Cloud Computing:  Gmail, SalesForce.com, Joyent, Amazon Services, etc.   The Enterprise Cloud is the continual migration of internet technologies into the internal enterprise data center along with the evoloution of virtualization in the enterprise and the move of large enterprise IT organizations into true internal service provider role.  VMware’s vCloud initiative and technology vision will enable an Enterprise Cloud to connet with the Web 2.0 Cloud and move computing from inside the enterprise out or oustide the enterprise in.

Rodos, who often wakes up early to join us on our podcast chat, also notes that we're not talking SaaS, and envisions the reverse DR scenario. Link: VMware Communities: Cloud Computing - vCloud Initiative for ....

This is where I see companies running production in the cloud, that is the service provider, where its more economical to provision and scale compute and storage resources on a cost per use basis. This environment would then be DR'd back into the enterprise's own data center for DR and data protection purposes. The enterprise can still keep/control copies of their own data and cater for failures (either technical or commercial) at the cloud provider.

And 3PAR's Mark Farley just thinks we're smart, and gets how we're leveraging the datacenter X and building the cloud X'. Although if you can't drive talking on the phone in California I don't think I'm going to be video podcasting on the way to work any time soon. Link: StorageRap: VMware's vCloud is much smarter than most think.

I'm liking this cloud roadmap both because it's making sense and also because it's poking holes in my worldview and assumptions just like it did when I first started encountering virtualization. More at cloudcomputing.alltop.com, although there's not a lot of VMware there yet. Where else should I be paying attention in the Enterprise Cloud conversation?