In recent years, VMware has been pushing to stay even with other cloud competitors, with the release of products such as vCloud Director. In fact, the virtualization giant recently bragged up its burgeoning presence in cloud land. But how much is hype versus potential?

Tuesday, the company took another incremental step toward a more cohesive cloud strategy when it announced that this quarter it will ship vCloud Integration Manager (vCIM) — a toolset that enables third-party cloud resellers to self-provision cloud services to their customers without involving manual processes or intervention from VMware techs.

The idea is to cut the time and hassle required to configure, deliver and manage vCloud Director-based clouds for services and applications vendors, providing quicker monetization for a key segment of the cloud market. VMware vCIM will integrate with other VMware components, including vCloud Director and vSphere, as well as vShield Edge and vCenter Chargeback Manager.

Additionally, vCIM will provide a REST-based application programming interface (API) that ties into the service provider’s back office systems, including CRM and billing.

“[vCIM] is taking a provisioning request and automatically generating all that’s required to configure a new virtual data center,” Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services at VMware, said.

Meanwhile, the company claims to be making headway in the growing cloud marketplace, with more than 90 services providers now offering “vCloud Powered” services in some 19 countries. That’s triple the number the company could boast at the end of last year’s third quarter, according to Lodge.

VMware may be on the right path, from one analyst’s viewpoint.

“I believe that in order for VMware to spur more service provider adoption of [its] vCloud Powered stack — and to improve the quality of the service provider implementations that are vCloud Powered — the vCIM component is an important, useful element,” Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner, said.

But is it possible that some of VMware’s celebrations may be a bit premature?

“VMware has signed many service providers to [its] vCloud Powered program, but many of those service providers haven’t launched offerings yet,” Leong said. “While VMware-based solutions are getting strong adoption from mid-market and enterprise customers, especially for hosted private cloud solutions, the growth of Amazon Web Services in particular has dwarfed the VMware-virtualized market,” she added.

That’s not to say VMware is too late to come from behind, however.

“We’re early in the adoption cycle still, and VMware’s strong foothold in the internal data center should enable it to drive adoption of service provider clouds based on its technologies,” Leong said.

No doubt landing one of the top telecom providers in the world is a coup from a PR perspective, but so far the partnership is a big paper tiger if you’re an IT shop looking to do anything real with this news.
The press release claims that, with “the click of a mouse,” customers can expand their internal VMware environments to Verizon’s Compute as a Service (CaaS) offering built on VMware vCloud Data Center, for instant, additional capacity. The overall effect is referred to as a hybrid cloud.

The immediacy and ease touted here is far from true; ironically, I learned this during a session at VMworld entitled “Cloud 101: What’s real, what’s relevant for enterprise IT and what role does VMware play.”

The speaker said that to move a workload from internal VMware resources to a vCloud service provider such as Verizon is currently a manual process. It require users to shut down the to-be-migrated workload, select the cloud you’ll deploy it to, then switch to the Web interface of that service provider and import the workload. I am leaving out a bunch of other steps too tedious to mention, but it’s hardly the click of a mouse!

In a follow-up conversation after the session, VMware said the missing feature that will allow automated workload migration, called the vCloud client plug-in, was still to come. No timeframe was given.

And this isn’t all the smoke and mirrors from Verizon; the telco claims its CaaS is the first cloud service to offer PCI compliance. This statement isn’t quite either because the current PCI standard, v1.2, does not support virtual infrastructures. So a real cloud infrastructure (a multi-tenant, virtualized resource) cannot be PCI compliant. The PCI Council is expected to announce v2.0 of the standard at the end of October, which will explain how to obtain PCI compliance in a virtual environment.

A word of advice to IT shops investigating hybrid cloud options: Be sure to play around with the service before you buy. In many cases, these offerings are still only half-baked.

While Redwood is still vapor as far as the public is concerned (and the basic VMware cloud technology, vCloud is still in pre-release at ver. 09) – it’s clear that VMware thinks it can capitalize on its position as the default virtualization platform for the enterprise and swoop in to become the private cloud platform of choice as enterprises increasing retool their data centers to look, and work, more like services like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.

Some people are grumpy about the term private cloud, saying it’s just a data center modernized and automated to the hilt – let’s get that out of the way by noting that “private cloud” is a lot easier to say than “highly automated and fully managed self-provisioning server infrastructure data center system with integrated billing”. It’s also less annoying than “Infrastructure 3.0″, a term that can make normally calm operators scream like enraged pterodactyls. Private cloud it is.

Project Redwood, now known as the VMware Service Director, will lay over a VMware vSphere installation and allow users governed self-service usage via a web portal and an API, effectively obscuring both the data center hardware and the virtualization software VMware customers are used to operating. The goal is to automate resource management so that admins don’t have to and make distributing computing resources as easy and flexible as possible, while maintaining full control.

According to the presentation, vCloud Service Director will support three modes of resource management: “Allocation pools“, where users are given a ‘container’ of resources and allowed to create and use VMs anyway they like up to the limits of the CPU and storage they paid for; “Reservation pools“, which give users a set of resources they can increase or decrease by themselves and “Pay-per-VM” for single-instance purchasing.

–From the article

That’s the IT side taken care of- the other really significant concept is vApps- users can build, save and move application stacks en suite, and will be able to flow out of their private cloud into VMware-approved public cloud services– vCloud Express hosters like BlueLock and Terremark. So admins get control and visibility, and users get true scalability and self-service. That means there’s something for everyone in the enterprise.

Other tidbits from the document-VMware’s concept of cloud:

Cloud Computing according to VMware
Lightweight entry/exit service acquisition model
Consumption based pricing
Accessible using standard internet protocols
Elastic
Improved economics due to shared infrastructure
Massively more efficient to manage

And how Redwood is the answer:

Project Redwood Strategy
High-Level: Enable broad deployment of
compute clouds by:
• Delivering a software solution enabling self-service
access to compute infrastructure
• Establishing the most compelling platform for
internal and external clouds
Approach
• Allow enterprises to create fully-functional internal
cloud infrastructure
• Create a broad ecosystem of cloud providers to
give enterprises choice
• Provide identical interfaces between internal and
external clouds to allow toolsets to operate
identically with either
• Enable developers on the cloud platform to create
new applications within a cloud framework

Of course, there are products that can already do this and already well on the way to maturity- Abiquo springs to mind. You can do everything Redwood is shooting for today, if you’re so inclined. A titillating report says an audience that reportedly contained VMware engineers cheered during an Abiquo demo. The problem is you have to bring your own hypervisor- few want their YAVS(Yet Another Vendor Syndrome)infection complicated.

Oracle, on the other hand, has reinvented itself as a “complete stack” of private cloud products, from the Sun iron on up, and IBM is happy to sell you iron that behaves like cloud, and so on.

But VMware is betting brand loyalty, severe antipathy towards non-commodity hardware and inertia will catapult it past the upstarts and comfortably ahead of Microsoft, its real competition here, which is shooting for the same goal with Hyper-V and the Dynamic Data Center but is at least a year behind VMware here.

Enterprises running clouds are inevitable, goes the thinking; virtualization is ideally suited to both cloud computing and the commoditized hardware market–provide the entire software stack needed to turn those servers and switches into compute clouds, and you’ll make out like a bandit, especially when the only serious competition to try and offer the same thing right now is Canonical on one extreme, and Oracle on the other.

If you are running an enterprise data center, want drop-in, one-stop cloud computing, and your options are “free–from hippies” or “bend over“, VMware, who already makes your preferred hypervisor, will be a favored alternative. All they have to do is execute.

For instance , I spoke with newly minted VP of cloud computing at CSC, Brian Boruff. CSC is a big ($16.7 billion, 92,000 employees) consulting firm, and is opening a cloud computing division. The only real thing they can offer you so far is ‘cloud orchestration consultants’ who will come in and take care of the nuts and bolts using dozens, if not hundreds of other peoples’ technologies in your business — making sure they all meet whatever regulatory needs you have, auditing and compliance and so forth. CSC is rustling up an “alliance partner” to resell a standard package of cloud services and IaaS later on this year. Boruff commented on the rapidly evolving cloud market, saying “we are the only large player that’s technologically independent — we don’t sell [hardware], we don’t sell software”, so he feels CSC will have some influence on what becomes “cloud standard.” Unless it guesses wrong, of course.

SOA software maker TIBCO announced a management-minded suite for developers who really want to play in the cloud but have pesky, grumpy IT managers with governance needs. TIBCO Silver will make sure the “operations guy understands everything that” that developers do in the cloud, even after the fact, say spokesman Phillip Tree. It does this by automating a slew of governance functions, like performance monitoring, version tracking, logging, etc. It allows formalized test environments to be set up, so developers can play in TIBCO Silver/Amazon EC2, and then take their work to the SOA boss, who can in turn start an official dev cycle with a minimum of shouting and headaches.

Managed services firm IP Services is using application virtualization from InstallFree to provide regulatory compliance to applications in the cloud. Given that you’re paying IP Services good money to hang on to your apps and data, one assumes that they are using InstallFree to ensure compliance in their own virtualized, multihomed environment, not farming your goods out to EC2 or something.

Open source Java Virtual Machine scalers Terracotta announced a partnership with VMware. Customers can virtualize everything on VMware, develop JVMs within Terracotta and presumably hold a raffle for all the servers they don’t need any more, as customers, one presumes, port their VMware images to compatible public clouds. While that’s neat, what this really is another arrow in proprietary VMware’s quiver against a cloud market dominated by open source.

Two gentle ribbings:

Cloud software vendor ParaScale released a “TCO calculator,” but it doesn’t seem to work, and there are no instructions. So, that wasn’t well thought out.

Hosting firm REDPLAID (subsidiary of Connectria) has decided that having a shopping cart on its website and offering VMware machines for rent constitutes a public cloud. Honestly? Maybe the on-demand billing, self-service portal, repository of machine images and scalable resources are on the roadmap, but this might constitute band-wagon jumping to more cynical observers.

The yet to be released VDC-OS represents the evolution of the VMware Infrastructure; the platform, which is due for release sometime this year,  will transform traditional data centers into internal cloud environments. The business case for creating an private cloud is less complexity in the data center; software like VDC-OS will virtualize and automate systems to the point that there is less ‘knob turning’ and more time spent on tasks that improve business, said VMware Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Bogomil Balkansky.

“Too much of IT budgets are spent on management tasks and keeping the lights on, instead of on tasks that actually improve business,” Balkansky said. “Infrastructure complexities should not get in the way of this, but they do.”

While external clouds like Amazon EC2 offer the same benefits of internal clouds, VMware is betting that large enterprises won’t send their mission critical applications outside the four walls of their data centers to these providers. Instead, they will want to create private cloud compute infrastructures using software like VDC-OS.

“There are security challenges with public clouds; enterprises don’t trust [outsiders] with their customer and financial data,” Balkansky said.  “We want to transfer the notion of cloud computing to internal data center operations.”

VMware is also hosting a webinar on January 29 about Internal Cloud Computing, if you want to hear more on this.

Balkansky said private cloud computing environments will gain traction in large data centers, but that could just be a self-serving prophecy. After all, most public cloud providers won’t pay for VMware software and use free and open source Xen instead; hence, VMware has no place to go but within the enterprises that already know and love VMware.

While VMware is on an private cloud advocacy mission, as the largest virtualization provider on the planet, it can’t ignore the need to play well with public clouds. That’s where VMware’s vCloud initiative comes into play; it will eventually allow VMware users to move their virtual machines on demand between their datacenters and cloud service providers, and over 200 partners have signed up to support vCloud so far, Balkansky said.

Data from The451 Group, published in October, 2008, showed that 84% of their IT client base, several hundred large enterprises worldwide, have no plans to deploy internal, on-premise cloud computing.

Intergenia, a hosting company in Germany is the only public Q-Layer customer.

Q-Layer is focused on the orchestration layer above the hypervisor and supports VMware, Xen, Microsoft and Sun. Its NephOS software is designed to run on virtual and physical servers, storage and networks and abstracts all components in each layer through a uniform set of actions (E.g. create machine, reboot, backup, restore, start, stop, etc). The software translates these actions to the underlying physical or virtual technology. IT admins manage a virtual view that is automatically mapped to the underlying virtual or physical technology.

Other companies in this space include 3tera, Enomoly, Eucalyptus, DynamicOps, Arjuna and Cassatt, among others.

It sounds like great technology, which is typical of Sun, as is the timing. Sun’s track record of acquiring great technology and even building great technology way ahead of market adoption is second to none. This deal with Q-Layer looks to be in keeping with the technology focused company we know and love. Let’s hope IT shops are in a position to try this kit out sooner rather than later and Sun finally gets a break.

Since virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing, clouds are the next logical step for virtualization vendors like VMware and Citrix Systems, but Bittman said if these vendors don’t make pricing changes, cloud platform providers like Google and Amazon won’t use them.

“Cloud computing is a wide open market, dominated by open source Xen. It is a market that is there for the taking, and for VMware that would require a significantly different pricing model,” said Bittman, who also blogs about virtualization and cloud computing. “Sun and Citrix could get a major foothold in the cloud market as well, if they get their act together.”

VMware has taken steps towards becoming cloud friendly with its Vcloud initiative, but Vcloud is limiting because the provider has to use VMware, Bittman said. Microsoft also has its own cloud service, Azure, supported by Hyper-V.

Microsoft will probably try to turn Azure into a platform for ISV’s to build software as a service, so “in a lot of ways, they are trying to build a platform for a cloud,” Bittman said. But, “there is no reason Windows will be a prominent player in the cloud…[because providers] like Amazon EC2 don’t care what the OS is; all they care about is what is being provided.”

The future of clouds; more providers, fewer OSes

Today, cloud computing is dominated by a small number of large providers, but in the years ahead there will probably be ecosystems built around those islands; Software as a Service (SAAS) built upon the existing clouds, and the sharing of resources between cloud providers, Bittman said. He also expects fragmentation from the few general cloud platforms of today into many specialty cloud providers with applications and infrastructures that cater to specific industries, like healthcare, which have specific compliance requirements, Bittman said.

“We will see a growth to thousands of cloud providers and they won’t want to write their own software using Xen; they will want to buy software and that is where companies like Sun could make a play,” Bittman said.

Cloud computing is also changing the game when it comes to operating systems; the concept of the Meta-OS (like VMware’s Virtual Data Center OS) is changing the paradigm of using one OS per physical server, Bittman said.”The old idea is you build one platform to manage one box, but if I have 10,000 boxes, I don’t want 10,000 OSEs managing everything independently,” Bittman said. “If I turn an OS into a dumb container, it can work in a much more distributed way, like Microsoft’s Azure, which is essentially Windows 2008 sprinkled all throughout the data center. This is changing the way we look at OSes going forward.”

Cloud computing has the power to change things in the IT industry because of what it offers companies; flexibility and agility, Bittman said.

“Most infrastructures today focus on cost, but we are beginning to see a focus shift towards agility. People are using [cloud environments] not because of the cost savings, but because it is flexible. The ability to make changes according to demand qickly is becoming a more important factor for data centers,” Bittman said.

Rackspace’s plan centers on acquisition, partnership and expanding its existing Mosso Web hosting product into three broad offerings: Cloud Sites website hosting, Cloud Files storage service, and Cloud Servers virtual private servers.

On the acquisition side, RackSpace has acquired Jungle Disk, a cloud-based desktop storage and backup provider that has thus far relied on Amazon’s S3. It also acquired Slicehost, a provider of Xen-based virtual private servers (VPSs) that claims 11,000 customers and 15,000 virtual servers.

As far as new Mosso offerings, the new Cloud Files will come in at $0.15 per GB of replicated data, or if the data is distributed across a content delivery network (CDN), at $0.22 per GB. CDN capabilities come by way of a partnership with Limelight Inc.

Also as part of Cloud Files, RackSpace will partner with Sonian Networks to provide cloud-based email archiving starting at $3/mailbox.

Coming soon, Cloud Servers is Mosso’s new name for Slicehost’s VPS offering. Under Slicehost, the services starts at $20/month for a virtual Xen server with 256GB of RAM, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of bandwidth. “Slices” scale to 15.5GB of RAM, 620GB of storage and 2,000GB of bandwidth for $800/month.

When it comes to the Xen-based Slicehost — aka Cloud Servers — I should note that Mosso is a longtime VMware customer that has publicly pondered the viability of the relationship as it expands its services. It will be interesting to see whether this acquisition signals a break from VMware or whether it will continue to use VMware as the underpinning of its Cloud Sites offering. Rackspace, care to comment?

On another note, Slicehost is one of many hosting providers that use open source Xen as the basis of their cloud offerings. Presumably, it’s also the kind of company to which Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems Inc., referred when Citrix announced XenServer Cloud Edition and Citrix Cloud Center (C3) at VMworld 2008.

At the time, Crosby said that luring these hosting providers into Citrix support contracts was a huge priority. “Trivially, we looked around and found a couple hundred hosted IT infrastructure providers using open source Xen,” he said. “XenServer Cloud Edition is intended to win greenfield accounts but also to bring the open source Xen guys back home.” XenServer Cloud Edition boasts features like the ability to run Windows guests and commercial support.

One final thought: If any of you find this whole cloud computing thing a bit, ahem, nebulous, Lew Moorman, Rackspace’s chief strategy officer, made an interesting distinction between different types of cloud offerings. “Cloud apps,” Moorman said, are what we used to think of as Software as a Service (SaaS); “cloud hosting,” meanwhile, refers to pooled external compute resources. And of course, there’s cloud storage. Rackspace, it seems, will offer all three.