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VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

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VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.

Release: IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud

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IBM today announced the availability of the industry’s first public desktop cloud.

The new IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud subscription service helps clients virtualize desktop computing resources, and provide a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources.  This service requires no up front capital or one time expense and will provide the highest levels of security, resiliency, reliability, and quality for virtual desktops.  The service offers flexible delivery models, including three standard cloud-based offerings, dedicated infrastructure, and customer premise solutions, while providing the necessary safeguards to minimize the risk of data theft and loss, centralize data protection, and eliminate unauthorized access.

Through key technology and business partnerships with Citrix, Desktone, VMware and Wyse, along with IBM tools for customer assessment and strategic planning, IBM is helping financial organizations, public sector and academic institutions around the world address PC replacement dilemmas, deliver resilience and reliability for critical information, and resolve Internet access parity problems, all at competitive subscription service pricing.

Supported by government funding, the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network is partnering with IBM on a grass roots project called CBO Connect to provide desktop computing to over 200 sites nationwide.  The CBO Connect is a coalition of community based organizations consisting of non-profits, schools and libraries where visitors have access to 21st century classrooms that offer desktop cloud computing, interactive video conferencing for distance learning, video distribution system with digital signage, and other classroom and administrative services.

The IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud service will be available in the Americas and Europe starting October 2009.

Research: Hardware Server Sales Slump as IT Pros Bet On Virtualization and Consolidation

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TheInfoPro, an independent research company, today released new real-time data from its pending Server Study (final results due in October, Q3 2009) indicating that more than 50% of new servers being installed in 2009 will host virtualization, and future progressive growth indicates 80% by 2012.

Announced at VMworld 2009, TheInfoPro’s Server Study has conducted interviews with 195 IT pros wherein initial spending data indicates that 22% expect increases this year in server spending, but an additional 34% of the group indicates they’ll experience decreases. The IT pros range from Fortune 1000 (F1000) organizations to midsize enterprises (MSEs) in North America and Europe, and the interviews were completed between June and August 2009.

TheInfoPro Server Study also captures data about the rise of desktop virtualization, offers highlights on spending in each area of server management by vendor, and gives an in-depth look at VMware’s benefits and challenges in the current IT marketplace. For more information, visit TheInfoPro at booth #1322 or call the contact number below for a real-time briefing.

TheInfoPro’s network of IT pros stated that virtualization and consolidation is a critical lifeline to optimizing the current capacity of their existing physical servers. Virtualization deployments will continue to expand in the coming months, with 70% of the respondents citing it as critical to meeting their business objectives. Though hardware spending continues to show little growth, more than 50% of respondents do expect to resume hardware acquisition once the economy stabilizes. For now, Hewlett-Packard is positioned as a strong vendor in future choice of spending and faces the lowest vulnerability to customer switching when compared to competing vendors.

In software, despite the revenue-dampening effect of enterprise licensing, Microsoft remained steady in its category, with 22% of respondents indicating they would spend more throughout the remainder of 2009. VMware and Red Hat remain strong in their respective categories, with 41% and 30% spending more in 2009, respectively.

Zoho Partners with VMware to Bring Private Cloud Software-as-a-Service Solutions To Enterprise Customers

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Zoho today announced a relationship with VMware designed to give customers a streamlined approach to running Zoho applications in their own data centers, leveraging the industry-leading VMware platform, which has been adopted by thousands of customers.

For enterprises that want to run Zoho online applications on-site, Zoho historically delivered its applications as appliances, via racks of servers that were exact replicas of the hardware running in Zoho data centers. The rack solution, however, forced companies to use Zoho’s unique hardware configuration if they wanted to run Zoho on-site.

The VMware platform will minimize the hardware limitations of the Zoho rack, while increasing the availability, resilience and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure. Customers who want their Zoho applications to execute locally will have the choice of running Zoho applications on their internal cloud based on VMware vSphere 4, which runs on a broad range of hardware and is widely deployed in enterprises today.

The VMware relationship will give enterprises an improved approach for running Zoho on-site as an internal cloud and keeping their data behind the firewall, which has been a concern of customers. Zoho applications can also be integrated with a company’s existing applications. Users get the best of both worlds — data stays in-house, and cloud applications are deployed with complete control.

Vizioncore Debuts vOptimizer WasteFinder as Freeware

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Vizioncore today announced that vOptimizer Pro’s space and alignment scanning and reporting capabilities will now be available as a new freeware product called vOptimizer WasteFinder.

VMware customers will be able to use vOptimizer WasteFinder to search for over-allocated virtual storage and to immediately see the potential savings available from reclaiming this space.

Vizioncore customers worldwide have been using vOptimizer Pro to drastically reduce wasted virtual storage, typically an area in which businesses have little or no transparency or control. Once found, over-allocated storage can be reclaimed and reused by other virtual machines or other physical infrastructure. Businesses that have never considered themselves at risk of excessive storage waste can now easily and quickly download vOptimizer WasteFinder for free and reveal the true picture.

The tool also detects problem areas such as virtual machines that are not 64k aligned, which leads to poor I/O performance. Vizioncore’s initiative to offer free tools that accelerate virtualization adoption started earlier this year with the launch of the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI). Virtualization EcoShell focuses on script-based VM administration, providing a powerful personal productivity solution to VM administrators.

With a download and set-up time of approximately 15 minutes, vOptimizer WasteFinder can be run by any VMware customer. vOptimizer WasteFinder can be downloaded for free here, and additional product information is available here.

Release: VMLogix LabManager Cloud Edition

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VMLogix today announced the general availability of  VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition.

The new product enables software teams to run virtual labs within the gold-standard for public cloud computing, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and is the only offering on the market to offer an enterprise-class virtual lab solution with a utility-like pay-as-you-go model. The flexibility of this cost model is ideal for use cases where demand patterns are most variable like software development, testing, training, demonstrations and support. Additionally, VMLogix will offer a free license for LabManager – Cloud Edition beginning September 1. This offer and evaluation license will expire December 1, 2009.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition delivers a dynamic, scalable and elastic virtual lab enabling software teams to improve software quality and time to market. The solution works in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment and supports both Windows and Linux guest images as well as ISV-specific Amazon Machine Images (AMI). LabManager – Cloud Edition brings enhanced levels of integration and automation during the Amazon instance deployment including the ability to seamlessly handle the end user access to the guest console from within the browser.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition enables:

  • The creation and management of multi-machine configurations: enabling the combination of multiple AMIs into a single environment and providing capabilities to entirely automate the deployment and re-deployment of multi-machine environments (including software stack customizations) in a policy-governed self-service fashion;
  • Full virtual lab tool capabilities: tapping into powerful enterprise lab management capabilities including license, lease and user/team management as well as enabling users/teams to share and collaborate with lab artefacts, audit trails and access to a centralized repository of software media;
  • On-demand access to virtual lab resources: allowing for immediate access to computing infrastructure resources over the web from any location; and,
  • Pay-for-what-you-use pricing model: leveraging the elasticity of the cloud allows customers to reduce up front capital expenditures by instantly scaling up or scaling down the lab infrastructure when required, and only paying for what is used.