These Things Matter To Me

In plain English: Today VMware outlined a service where you can pay a 3rd party host your VMware guests. They also released an API that would make it so you wouldn’t have to switch management suites when you switched providers. Or decided later on to host your VM’s yourself. The hosting service is called vCloud Express, and it currently includes 5 providers, expected to grow to hundreds (thousands ?). The API is part of their vCloud universe, which includes a lot of other stuff besides vCloud Express.

The most exciting part of this is independence. A customer shouldn’t have to switch software when they grow. Or when they shrink. When they’re focused on agility. When they’re focused on performance. When they’re focused on security. So many software vendors can only have one kind of customer. Though there’s room for improvement, this move by VMware suggests that they’re creating a platform for people to use no matter where’s they’re at.

Industry articles are saying vCloud Express competes directly with Amazon’s EC2 service, and though there is an overlap (you can now pay somebody, not VMware, to host VMware-powered virtual servers), VMware’s strategy is a bit different. They don’t want to be the service provider. They either want to sell you the bits OR sell the provider the bits. But they’re creating a flexible space for the customer, where we don’t have to change technologies or management tools, no matter how much/little involved we are in managing the low-level infrastructure.

I see vCloud Express as more akin to a combination of the open-source/ EC2 API-comptible Eucalyptus and EC2 itself.  Users can grow management process, in-house tools, and 3rd party tools around either a behind-the-firewall Eucalyptus environment or Amazon Ec2, because it’s basically written for the same API.  And if all goes according to plan, VMware vCloud API can achieve the same thing.  A mixed environment with common tools written against the same platform.

I have a million bones to pick with VMware’s cloud approach, and the standard corporate hubris involved in being a late-comer to an established market, and submitting a proprietary reality as a new standard

But for this week, I want to just say, “right on” to VMware.  Though they don’t see it this way, it’s a major course correction, and a great example for other enterprise software vendors.

vCloud Express is off to a great start, and I hope to see its vision of customer freedom truly realized.  If so, its success wouldn’t even be tied to VMware hypervisors…

This entry was posted by andy on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 10:50 pm. It is filed under vmware and has these tags: vcloud api, vcloud express, vmworld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.