V IS THE WORD

Last week at VMworld Paul Maritz CEO of vmware set out its vision for the future of virtualisation. In his keynote speech he positioned vmware’s approach around three key elements; firstly the concept of a Virtual Data Centre (VDC)-OS, secondly a move towards the concept of vCloud, and finally re-positioning vmware – changing the message from having a server virtualisation heritage to emphasising that it began as a founder of client virtualisation – and launching its vClient initiative. Supporting this vision was a rebranding, with all products/services now being prefixed with a ‘v’.

For many years now the analysts have been calling vmware an OS vendor, but it refused to accept the label arguing that it considered its self a virtualisation vendor, and was not a direct competitor of Microsoft’s, rather a complementary technology. However, the announcement of the VDC-OS demonstrates a move towards a vmainframe computer principal. Effectively, what VDC-OS will enable is for large resource pools to be created from a collection of commodity based hardware, which can consist of storage, servers, or network devices. These large computing resource pools it is argued will provide the scalability needed by organisations to execute a collection of applications that provide a business service as a single Virtual Machine (VM).
The VDC-OS is a framework that has three main components, the interface to the hardware is called vInfrastructure Services, and includes vCompute, vStorage, and vNetwork, which are all capabilities designed to abstract the resources so they can be pooled. The second component is Application vServices, which addresses the changing nature of an applications relationship to an OS. The final component is the management layer, and vmware have renamed Virtual Centre (VC) to vCentre. The VDC-OS represents the evolution of vmware’s Virtual Infrastructure (VI) solution, and it is anticipated that by early 2009 many of the capabilities required to make VDC-OS a reality will be available.
The vCloud initiative consists of three different approaches, the first is a program for service providers that will enable them to construct cloud solutions that can be offered to its customers, secondly it will eventually be a product that enterprises can purchase to construct its own internal cloud, and finally a set of APIs that will allow the on-demand allocation of resources between internal and external clouds to operate. However, I consider that before vCloud becomes widely adopted a number of key issues need to be addressed, not least of which is details on how the services will be licensed and managed.
The last major thread of vmware’s future plans is a shift in emphasis away from server virtualisation towards desktop or client virtualisation with its vClient initiative. The objective is to enable the end-user to connect from any device and receive their personal desktop environment. The main component of this plan is the development of a client side Hypervisor that will be a bare metal Hypervisor and control the protocols used so that the end-user experience is delivered according to what device and what connectivity the user is using.

I believe that vmware has been very bold in making clear how it see’s its future, but has to wonder how much of Paul Maritz key note was aimed at Wall Street and allaying the fears of its investors about future revenue streams; this road map of how it plans to grow the business and deal with the threat of Microsoft’s entry into the market provides that audience with what it needs, but is the technology mature enough to support this radical shift in the data centre.