management VMware Infrastructure 3

Peeling the VI onion: introducing the VI Team Blog

The VI Team has opened the doors on their brand spankin’ new blog over at http://blogs.vmware.com/vi. They’ll be posting occasional pieces on their view of virtualization, the technology, where it’s headed, how it all fits together, and what they’re hearing from customers, both big and small.

Product marketing manager Leena Joshi starts us off. Leena is over the jet lag from her trip to VMworld Europe in Cannes, where she presented on What’s new in VI 3.5. On the new VI Team Blog, she breaks apart the different layers of VI3, and what we mean when we say “Management & Automation.” Link: VMware virtualization perspectives | VI Team Blog.

Today we begin with an overview of how we think about the entire virtualization stack. The clarification of our viewpoint is necessary because the market tends to speak of two categories – 1. The hypervisor and 2. An amorphous glob called “management”. While it is relatively clear what the hypervisor is, it is far from clear what is being lumped under “management” in the virtualization context.

In our minds, there are two distinct layers of “management” on top of the hypervisor – the virtual infrastructure capabilities, and the automation capabilities.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and “peel the onion” layer by layer.

Go over and say hi.