VMware fills in cloud management gap with latest vCloud Suite

Earlier this month, Citrix fired shots at VMware with the announcements of XenServer 6.1, its CloudStack integration, and its other newly added cloud-centric features. But it didn’t take long for VMware to fire back.

In what ended up being the main attraction at last week’s VMworld Europe event in Barcelona, VMware delivered a compelling cloud story to the show’s approximately 8,000 attendees. At the show, VMware announced an update to its vCloud Suite, a core component of the company’s software-defined data center strategy that enables all components of the infrastructure to be controlled, deployed, and automated with software.

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During VMworld Europe, the virtualization giant unveiled an update to its cloud management portfolio and said it was now focusing on three critical areas: cloud service provisioning, cloud operations management, and cloud business management. To address that new focus, VMware has added four new enhancements to its vCloud Suite that include vCloud Automation Center 5.1, vFabric Application Director 5.0, vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6, and vCloud Connector 2.0.

During one of the keynote sessions at VMworld Europe, VMware CTO Steve Herrod spoke about the new vCloud in detail and recently blogged about it, saying:

Management must change in a fundamental way. In today’s cloud era, there are faster moving parts, a requirement for greater scalability, a substantial need for self-service — and a core requirement of deep automation. VMware brings new capabilities to our customers to better manage their software-defined datacenters with vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Management Suite, and vFabric Application Director. 

The key update to the vCloud Suite comes from the vCloud Automation Center 5.1 release. This component is in large part built on the technology acquired from DynamicOps, which also may turn out to be the company’s cloud management secret sauce.

In early July, VMware scooped up DynamicOps, a virtualization management and cloud provisioning and automation solution provider that was spawned out of Credit Suisse. In a move that seemed to come out of nowhere, VMware may have pre-empted a possible acquisition by Dell, which was at the time a bit preoccupied with its own acquisition of Quest Software. By beating Dell and perhaps others to the punch, VMware has been able to add a key component to its cloud management capabilities.

VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 is a new addition to VMware’s vCloud Suite. Using the DynamicOps technology, VMware is able to deliver a service governor, enabling policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors, and Amazon Web Services. VMware recognizes that the cloud is about self-service access and automation.

Thus, Automation Center delivers a self-service portal where administrators, developers, or business users can request new IT services or manage existing resources. Herrod said users can select from a set of applications that will deploy and run automatically with full policy linkages, allowing them to move faster.

VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will also be integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to leverage virtual data centers composed of VMware vCloud Suite’s software-defined services. vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will also integrate with vCenter Orchestrator to automate IT process workflows across both VMware and customers’ existing management tools and processes. As an example, by using external hooks the system can deploy and provision Hyper-V hypervisors directly through System Center or deploy EC2 compute and S3 storage clouds through AWS cloud APIs.

vFabric Application Director 5.0 was designed to provision applications on any cloud by standardizing and accelerating the ways customers model and deploy multitier applications using blueprints with pre-approved operating system and middleware components.

VMware says that while vFabric Application Director 5.0 was primarily optimized for VMware vCloud Suite-based clouds, “[It] will make it possible for customers to use the same blueprints to deploy applications across multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures, including Amazon EC2.” The product will continue to expand application support for all Microsoft packaged applications including Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint, as well as custom applications built on Java, .Net, and Ruby on Rails.

Beyond pricing and packaging updates, vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 has also been given a facelift and a new lease on life. This is an analytics tool that can watch what’s going on inside of a vSphere or vCloud stack so that administrators know what’s happening within their environments. The integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management provides the intelligence customers need to proactively enable service levels in hybrid cloud environments. But perhaps the most important aspect of the new Operations Management Suite is that it helps manage risk in terms of compliance, not just capacity and performance. New views in the operations dashboard will help customers proactively enforce compliance with IT policies, security guidelines, and regulatory requirements.

VMware also introduced vCloud Connector 2.0, the latest version of the tool used to reliably and efficiently transfer virtual machines and data between clouds. This latest version makes that process even simpler. vCloud Connector 2.0 comes with the VXLAN protocol built in, which allows users to move their workloads across hybrid clouds while retaining the same IP and Ethernet MAC address. This allows users to move applications without requiring DNS or other network reconfigurations, a powerful example of software-defined networking. With 2.0, vCloud Connector can also now automatically synchronize catalogs of virtual machines and applications across clouds using a publish-and-subscribe mechanism.

The deployment of vCloud connector is now much faster in a multi-tenant cloud. The vCloud Connector node, which handles the transfers, can now be deployed once to manage all tenants in a cloud where the previous version required one node per tenant.

VMware has been taking positive steps toward a more open view of the world. The company no longer dismisses or turns a blind eye to the thought of a heterogeneous, multihypervisor virtual data center or multicloud environment.  While it continues to build on its own stack, the company is also spanning across other open initiatives such as its CloudFoundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology, its continued development with Nicira on OpenFlow, and the recent admission of VMware into the OpenStack Foundation.

VMware appears to be getting a lot more generous with regard to its products plugging into competing data center components. That should end up being good news for many data center administrators and organizations around the globe. However, with much of the new vCloud Suite’s IP coming from acquisitions and things just starting to be sewn together in a cohesive manner, I suspect some organizations will wait a while to let others identify the bumps in the road and give VMware time to work out the kinks and the bugs.

VMware cloud automation solutions are expected to be available sometime during the fourth quarter of 2012.The vCloud Suite will be licensed per processor with no core, vRAM, or number of virtual machine limits. Pricing will start at $4,995 per processor.

This article, “VMware fills in cloud management gap with latest vCloud Suite,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.