VMTN Blog

It's an interesting conversation people are having in cloud-land at the moment. Microsoft Azure competes more directly with Google AppEngine, and somehow Amazon always comes into the discussion, but VMware, since we aren't a service provider, isn't on many people's radar in this conversation yet. (Peter Laird and Tim O'Reily give pretty lucid cloud taxonomies.) Here VMware's Dan Chu compares Microsoft's approach to VMware's - very worth a read. VMware: Windows Azure More Smoke than Cloud

"With vCloud, we don't become a service provider," says Chu. "Microsoft is stepping over the line, and now intends to compete directly against some of their [hosting and service provider] partners." By comparison, Chu argues that vCloud is a platform that is supported by a broad range of third-party service providers, including British Telecom, Saavis, Rackspace, Terremark, and others.

The second failing of Windows Azure Chu sees is the lack of support for applications and platforms that aren't based on the .NET framework. "[With vCloud] we're looking to support a broad range of existing applications...without forcing customers to rewrite applications, or to only have certain kinds of apps, "says Chu. "VMware's products are already providing a platform that people are using to deploy internal clouds, and that our partners are already using to create external clouds."

Link: Paul Maritz: The Future of Cloud Computing | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com.

            NEWSWEEEK: What is VMware             '             s vision of cloud computing?
Paul Maritz: You can divide the cloud today into two categories. One is the enterprise cloud, and there is one, for want of a better phrase, that I call the new-age cloud. The enterprise cloud is really about providing the opportunity for existing IT customers to take their existing workloads and have somebody else supply the underlying infrastructure … The other type of cloud is what I call the new-age cloud. This is about supporting fundamentally new applications. It's not about the current applications that are being used in the IT space. Ultimately the two will come together.

         

            What are the biggest reasons for cloud computing to happen?
Businesses are going to want the flexibility to outsource the provisioning of infrastructure to people who can be presumably more efficient at it than they can be. The motivation is going to come really from having other people provide the "plumbing"—power, the day-to-day management, the reliability, uptime and so forth. Businesses will want to have the option of moving their application loads into, and equally importantly back out of, this outsourced infrastructure as they see fit.

Rod Haywood took the time to write up a transcript of last week's vCloud podcast. Since there isn't a lot yet written about the details of our vCloud initiative, this makes for good reading. He also has some great notes and thoughts on the VDC-OS podcast. Here's a quick section about the new REST-style vCloud APIs we're working on:  Musings of Rodos: Transcript of "All about the vCloud" podcast from VMTN.

So compared to the VIM APIs if you wanted to any type of rich operation, lets say provision a new machine, that could have four or five discrete steps to it, some of them could be synchronous, some could be asynchronous, you would have to coble together the work flow of things and map out the dependencies and trap the error conditions in case one of them didn't come through. What we have done is boil these things up to much simpler course grained operations so you can provision a machine through one call, sit on your response code and deal with an error code due to something such as a lack of billing information to make that provision or what ever else might be the case. But we are definitely trying to make it a much simpler way to very immediately pull together services that would sit on top of that infrastructure. The scope of the API at this point is working on making sure we cover all your basic infrastructure operations so provisioning of machines, all your basic state transitions, capturing inventory of what you have, we have added a couple of new containers that we think are helpful for people managing infrastructure, so that people can take a larger pool of infrastructure and chop it up, so if the case was you are a large company and you wanted to make a volume purchase of capacity you could then chunk it up and hand it off to business units for individual projects and then manage it in those individual containers. We will be pushing out the documentation for everybody to start engaging with and providing feedback at the end of the first quarter next year.

The Economist has a nice special report on Cloud Computing and corporate IT, and successfully explains the various flavors, from the SaaS/Gmail to the VDC-OS enterprise cloud. It's hard to pull out one quote, so here are two samples:

The evolution of data centres | Where the cloud meets the ground | The Economist.

“In a way, we’re cleaning up Microsoft’s sins,” says Paul Maritz, VMware’s boss and a Microsoft veteran, “and in doing so we’re separating the computing workload from the hardware.” Once computers have become more or less disembodied, all sorts of possibilities open up. Virtual machines can be fired up in minutes. They can be moved around while running, perhaps to concentrate them on one server to save energy. They can have an identical twin which takes over should the original fail. And they can be sold prepackaged as “virtual appliances”.

The economics of the cloud | Highs and lows | The Economist.

Cloud computing is unlikely to bring about quite such a dramatic shift. In essence, what it does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.

Drawing a neat diagram of the IT stack will also become increasingly difficult because the layers are becoming less distinct. In a world of services it often does not make sense to think of hardware and software separately, argues Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco. Both need to be blended to offer new services, she says.

Here are the articles in the series:

• IT's global “cloud”
• The evolution of data centres
• Software as a service
• Connecting to the cloud
• The economics of the cloud
• The long nimbus
• Computers without borders
• Sources and acknowledgments (nice set of links)

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?