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Virtual Private Data Center

vCloud: VMware To Be Cloud Computing Provider Too, But Inside Your Private DC (And Not Tomorrow)

September 15, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

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:

  • Virtual Datacenter OS: official release from VMware
  • VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS by Scott Lowe
  • VMware Tries to Expand Throughout the Data Center by James Niccolai at PCworld

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud vServices, Paul Maritz, vCenter, vCloud, vCloud Initiative, VDC-OS, Virtual Datacenter Operating System, Virtual Datacenter Operating System for VMware, Virtual Datacenter OS, Virtual Datacenter OS from VMware, Virtual Private Data Center, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMWorld, VPDC

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing: Q-layer Launches Delegation Manager

June 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Q-layer, enabler of cloud computing through Virtual Private Data Centers (VPDC), today announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a cloud computing platform.

The first release of Delegation Manager provides complete support for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, including the VMware ESX Hypervisor, with future support for additional Hypervisors including Xen, xVM VirtualBox and Hyper-V. The Q-layer Delegation Manager aims to enable fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non-technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and flash-based management controls.

Q-layer’s Delegation Manager is installed through the VMware Virtual Center as a Virtual Appliance and builds on Q-layer’s VPDC and Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) technology. It enables model-driven orchestration capabilities for data centers, including workflows to cohesively orchestrate virtual servers, networks and storage.

According to the press release, the Q-layer Delegation Manager augments existing data center infrastructure, including hypervisors, networks and storage devices. The system provides complete orchestration of these underlying assets to enable data center agility for cloud computing. To facilitate this ecosystem, Q-layer is also working with leading technology partners to create complete virtualization solutions for the next generation data center.

“With Q-layer’s Delegation Manager, end-users can provision and deploy a complete data center within minutes,” said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management at Q-layer. “Our technology has been proven in leading data centers, and leverages the capabilities of existing data center infrastructures to provide the most simple and extensible cloud computing solution for data center operators.”

The Q-layer Delegation Manager will be generally available in the third quarter of 2008. Pricing starts at $1,995 per node, for any number of Virtual Machines.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: cloud computing, DAL, Datacenter Abstraction Layer, Delegation Manager, Paul Speciale, Q-layer, Q-layer DAL, Q-layer Datacenter Abstraction Layer, Q-layer Delegation Manager, Q-layer Virtual Private Data Center, Q-layer VPDC, Qlayer, Virtual Private Data Center, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWare Virtual Center, VPDC

PINS Virtualizes Its Data Center With Q-layer and VMWare ESX Server

February 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

PINS, a Dutch hosting and managed services provider, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Q-layer, enabling the hosting provider to launch a Virtual Private DataCenter solution, based on Q-layer’s virtualization technology and using VMware’s ESX server technology.

pins.png

q-layer.png

With the Virtual Private DataCenter (VPDC) software from Q-layer, PINS’ customers are now able to build and manage a virtual environment including virtual servers, firewalls, switches, storage and software appliances. The virtual private datacenter comes with a “drag & drop” web interface. The Q-layer datacenter abstraction layer translates this environment into actual resources in the datacenter and executes instant provisioning using customizable workflows.

“PINS is renowned for being the first to launch winning new technology.”, said Jan Willem des Tombe, CEO of PINS, “The Q-layer Virtual Private DataCenter concept allows us to provide a new level of flexibility to our customers and partners, while leveraging the performance and stability of VMware ESX.”

From the press release:

PINS already offers web and application hosting based on VMware ESX. The VPDC offering based on Q-layer is the next step in the evolution and overcomes the complexity of automating the provisioning of the whole hosting stack including servers, network and storage. This is needed to build a real-time infrastructure.

PINS will bring the VPDC model to market in three flavors: one for end-users that require full self-service provisioning of servers and other services, one for resellers enabling them to setup server environments with the click of a button and one for managed customers where PINS engineers will build the environment for the customer.

“We are proud to have been chosen by PINS for its next-generation hosting platform.”, said Niko Nelissen, VP Business Development of Q-layer. “Both companies share a vision on how datacenter services will be operated in the future and how virtualization helps in building a real-time infrastructure with instant availability of all services”.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: hosting, Jan Willem des Tombe, Niko Nelissen, PINS, Q-layer, Virtual Private Data Center, Virtual Private DataCenter, virtualisation, virtualization, VMware ESX, VMWare ESX Server, VPDC

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