VDC-OS

More and more details on what VMware calls the “Virtual Datacenter OS” are starting to come out of VMworld. The new CEO, Paul Maritz, is expected to elaborate on this new strategy in today’s keynote. (update: check our live blog coverage)

(Update 2: also check the coverage on Between The Lines and Virtually Speaking, both ZDNet blogs)

The VDC-OS is not a new product per se, but an umbrella name for a set of products and features, much like VMware Virtual Infrastructure is composed of ESX server, VirtualCenter and features like DRS, HA and VMotion.

VDC-OS is a natural evolution from the “virtual infrastructure” approach, which no longer only includes the virtualization servers and their shared storage and networking, but also the “next layer” in the virtualization stack, both upwards and downwards: VDC-OS no longer stops at the guest OS level, but provides application services as well, and in the other direction goes beyond the local network and is aware of the bigger picture.

The building blocks that make up VDC-OS will sound very familiar to beta testers of ESX 4.0 and technology partners. They include some new features, recent acquisitions and better integrated versions of the current product line-up, as well as third-party add-ons bearing the VMware Ready logo. All of these are called “vServices”.

The three big areas of vServices VMware identifies are:

Application vServices – Availability, Security, Scalability
Infrastructure vServices – vCompute, vStorage, vNetwork and vCloud
Management vServices – vCenter (the new name for VirtualCenter)

The new and current features in depth:

Application Services
Availability:

HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion, NIC/HBA teaming
VMware Fault tolerance, formerly known as “Continuous availability” – which allows a VM to run on two hosts simultaneously, using lock-stepping of CPU instructions. (new)
vCenter Data Recovery – built-in disk-based backup and recovery of VMs and the files within them, including data deduplication. (new)

Security

ESXi, a stripped-down hypervisor in only 32 MB of code, to reduce the attack surface
VMware vSafe (first announced at VMworld Europe), with third party support add-ons from IBM, Checkpoint, Radware and McAfee, who will announce their first products today (new)

Scalability

DRS
Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and PCIe devices like network adapters (new)
Very large VMs with 8 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (new)

Infrastructure Services

vCompute

CPU/Memory optimization with hardware assists, page sharing and memory ballooning
DRS
VMDirectPath – enabling wirespeed network access to VMs (new)
Paravirtualized SCSI – providing more iops per second at lower latency (new)

vStorage

VMFS
Linked clones (first demonstrated at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco) – allows multiple VMs to run from the same base disk (new)
Storage VMotion
Thin Provisioning (new)
APIs to closer work together with storage arrays (new)

vNetwork

more offload technologies to reduce virtualization overhead
Distributed vNetwork virtual switches (new)
Third-party virtual switches – the first one to be announced today by Cisco (new)

Cloud Services (vCloud)

VMotion and Storage VMotion (within the “internal cloud”)
VMware vCloud (new)
Network vMotion – preserving network and security policies when a virtual machine is being migrated (new)
vApp – an encapsulation of a VM and its policies and service levels, based on OVF (new)

Management

vCenter replaces VirtualCenter, and integrates the add-on products today known as Stage Manger, Lab Manager and the likes. It integrates withing other management frameworks from the likes of IBM and CA.

vCenter AppSpeed – performance monitoring and remediation to guarantee service levels. (new)
vCenter Orchestrator – to automate repetitive workflows
vCenter CapacityIQ – proactive capacity planning for entire VI environments
vCenter Chargeback – to allow IT departments or cloud service providers to charge based on VM usage
vCenter ConfigControl – called “update manager on steroids” by VMware, a central way to configure and update the virtual data center
Host Profiles – to standardize the setup of ESX hosts using templates

Watch out for more announcements by VMware and its partners in the coming hours and days.

Many of the 14.000 attendants to VMworld will be happy to learn they are not going to be out of their jobs soon. Especially with cloud providers threatening to reduce corporate IT departments, completely virtualized datacenters are believed to be the future. VMware intends to keep those datacenters under their corporate client’s control on standardized X86 hardware.

(Update: link to the ‘Virtual Datacenter OS for VMware‘ product page and its Cloud vServices)

(Update 2: the link to the official press release, more comments below and a mention on Between The Lines)

Will vCloud be introduced as a cure against outsourcing to third party data centers? It is VMware’s aspiration to offer every business the flexible infrastructure associated with Amazon, Google and Salesforce. However without the need to offer excess computing power to external clients. VMware is not alone with this vision as this is very close to the network grail George Kurian at Cisco envisions:

What is most important in the virtualization world is to not to think about your data center as traditional silos of storage, server, network, firewall, application… We need to bring virtualization into the network… If you think about networking speeds and latency getting faster and lower respectively, you can, in essence, really extend virtualization to all aspects of IT systems. Down the road we see the opportunity to drive things like processor virtualization, memory virtualization, as interconnect speeds go up dramatically and latencies reduce over the next two to three years.

VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz (who was an early believer in cloud computing) will use this vCloud announcement (not a product release) to warm up the 14,000 people expected at its annual conference in Las Vegas this week. According to a well researched article by Patrick Thibodeau over at Computer World:

… the planned cornerstone product is VMware’s Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) for managing the underlying systems, or “internal cloud.” Desktops and laptops are part of this virtualization umbrella, with their operating systems running in a virtual machine on the client computer that is managed back from the data center. VMware also wants to make it possible for IT managers to seamlessly tap into the resources of third-party hosting providers in the same way they can now move server resources inside their data center. It calls this new technology vCloud. VMware’s product set, including its VDC-OS, is limited to x86 architectures. That’s why Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior director of product marketing cited Google as the example of IT’s Parthenon, and not the data center of some other Fortune 100 company. Google has standardized on x86. Most other large companies and many mid-sized firms also have environments that include RISC-based servers, Unix operating systems and midrange systems running Cobol-based applications that have been developed over decades — not on the new systems that Google has bought and built in its 10 short years….
Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., believes VMware’s approach will raise interesting questions for hardware vendors, in particular, about its long-term impact on their products. If all x86 systems are treated as virtual pools, the underlying hardware may be of less consequence, he said.

The initiative has broad support from partners across the industry, including BT, Rackspace, SAVVIS, Sungard, T-Systems, and Verizon Business.

Intel will not be shocked by that conclusion as it will gladly ship those six core processors. Neither will HP be panicking as it has been succesfully integrating its own virtualization suites across multiple platforms (X86, Integrity) and continues to extend its Opsware capabilities. And Sun went open source with its xVM Server as outgrowth of the Xen project that even supports SPARC and Solaris.

We are very curious if “vCloud” as a product name is going to survive the release cycles and the vetting by their marketing department. It also has to be noted that vCloud is specifically intentend to be an Operating System for all aspects of the virtual datacenter. We suggest to rather name it the VDC-framework, as it seems to contain sets of services to be extended in very standardized ways (APIs & SDKs) and no direct interaction with the underlying hardware. The Xen model has proven to be very successful with such ‘extensions’ by third party ISVs.

We could not help to notice that the domain name vCloud.com redirects to VoiceCloud.com, which is powered by that omni-present cloud provider: Amazon Web Services.

VMware’s partners do learn there is some good news to with plenty of room to hook on those new API sets and offer their tools for managing heterogeneous hypervisor environments or as Balkansky boldly puts it:

“Our strategy for now is to provide richer capabilities for our operating systems rather than provide some shallow capabilities for other platforms”.

Update: More interesting links on this VMworld keynote surprise spoiler: