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As a software vendor, VMware’s approach to the Cloud was always going to be different. Unlike Fujitsu, which is hedging its bets on services, and HP which is linking cloud to appliances, VMware wants to jump on the back of the challenges it believes will turn the Cloud space into a management minefield. It wants to crack the question of how to manage an increasingly complex data center environment.

As a result, it made its biggest move yet into the management space with VMware vCenter Operations Management, which pulls together performance, capacity and configuration management across the cloud environment. It also released VMware vFabric Application Management Suite at VMworld Europe in 2011 which allows operators to set permissions for certain applications for the automation of future rollouts, reducing the complexity of application delivery.

“With the infrastructure layer ready, business owners now manage the build and release of applications more directly and therefore have more accountability for the performance of these applications,” VMware says on its vFabric site. “To be successful, application owners need a new approach to application management that is simple to use, cloud-ready and provides the visibility and control to meet demanding performance goals,”

These management suites run alongside the UIT Business Management Suite, which VMware says is designed to turn the CIO into a broker, offering visibility into costs, service levels and vendor operations, aggregating data from financial sources and applying analytics and modelling once again for a single view of operating, capital and service expenses.

VMware CTO Steve Herrod says cloud is demanding a new way of looking at applications and infrastructure. “Virtualization has severed the tie between application and infrastructure,” Herrod said at VMworld Europe. “This core notion of applications tied into infrastructure has been building. We have now moved into a more dynamic workload where applications are really changing the mapping [of the data center] and users are now more dynamic than ever, so we need management tools that can keep up with this massive amounts of change.”

Why software loves the Cloud

VMware also promotes what it calls the ‘software driven data center’. Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s SVP and general manager of virtualization and cloud platforms, says the increasing standardization of hardware is opening up new opportunities for software in the data center.

“The data center we know is moving from a specialized hardware world to standardized hardware box, where increasingly the functions we know of will be developed and deployed in software. The control of the data center will even more importantly be completely done by software, that is why we call this the software driven data center,” Raghuram says.

He says if you combine this with trends taking place becasue of the Cloud, such as the virtualization of the data center, and the way applications are being developed for the Cloud and social media, you are left with a completely new architecture for the data center, which also requires a new operating model. “It (the Cloud) needs to be elastic and mobile, giving lower cost per application than ever before. We think we can get to less than US$100 per virtual machine a year. Operators working in very new data centers believe that the hardware will fail, for example, but they can count on the software to smartly lead it through these hardware failures. The software will substitute for the hardware in most cases.”

Rhaguram believes the next generation of integration in core virtual platforms will be driven by the Cloud. “Today, you have two roles in the Cloud – Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. As we go down this journey we will see virtual platforms evolve to support existing and new applications, which means they will become more naturally hypervisor services,” he says. 

 

This article first appeared in FOCUS 19. to sign up for your copy of FOCUS 20, whcih will have more information on the Cloud, click here.