VMware opens up to multihypervisor support with acquisition of DynamicOps

Two announcements last week greatly altered the virtualization and cloud management ecosystems. The geek in me wants to describe these events as having caused a “great disturbance in the force.” Don’t get me wrong: The events were neither good nor evil in nature, but they did cause a shift in the balance of power within the virtualization management community.

The first announcement was Dell’s acquisition of Quest Software, which instantly positioned Dell as one of the top virtualization management vendors in the market, capable of giving other third-party vendors and the big four a run for their money. Later that same day, virtualization giant VMware — in a move that seemed to come out of nowhere — announced plans to acquire DynamicOps, a virtualization management and cloud provisioning and automation solution provider that was spawned out of Credit Suisse and founded in 2008.

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Three things initially jumped out at me when reading up on the VMware acquisition.

Heterogeneous virtualization management

For years, VMware has been insisting it wouldn’t provide heterogeneous support for competing vendors’ hypervisors — after all, doing so would validate those other platforms as legitimate. Time and time again, VMware downplayed those technologies as inferior, making it sound like other platforms were always one or two steps behind, trying to play catch-up with vSphere.

But with the acquisition of DynamicOps, VMware is finally offering its customers a way to manage third-party hypervisors. This is quite a departure from previous management strategies that assumed a VMware-only environment. If indeed companies are experimenting or moving to heterogeneous virtualized data centers, VMware may have realized it needed to support other platforms in order to stay relevant. This idea was further substantiated when VMware announced the acquisition and let the following slip out:

VMware believes that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture, but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management.

Public and private cloud management

Beyond virtualization management, VMware’s acquisition of DynamicOps seems a necessity when it comes to private and public cloud management and taking VMware customers from virtualization to the cloud.

VMware really doesn’t have much of a choice. VMware may want vSphere to be the de-facto standard platform, but there is increased competition from all directions. Microsoft, Citrix, and Amazon all have something to say about who should lead this effort, and open source, multihypervisor cloud management offerings are also coming out of CloudStack, OpenStack, and Eucalyptus. In the same press release announcing the DynamicOps acquisition, VMware stated:

For customers whose requirements for managing and provisioning resources extend beyond VMware-only environments, DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by enabling customers to consume multi-cloud resources (e.g., physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2).

While this probably wasn’t easy, VMware is now admitting that some of its customers are using hypervisors and cloud infrastructures other than vSphere within their private and public cloud environments. In addition to the above statement, Ramin Sayar, VP and general manager of VMware’s cloud infrastructure and management group, wrote in an official VMware blog:

A number of customers have told me that, while they have and will continue to standardize on vSphere for their production datacenters, they have a few pockets of other hypervisors for various reasons, and they are looking for a multi-hypervisor management solution.

Sayar went on to say, “DynamicOps’s unique model-driven architecture enables our vSphere and infrastructure admins to easily model IT infrastructure services so that the same policy, governance, self-service management capabilities we provide for vSphere can be extended to other hypervisors, physical hardware and other cloud resources.”

Dell’s agreement with DynamicOps

With their latest acquisitions, VMware and Dell could be on a collision course when it comes to virtualization management solutions. Marketing departments across the ecosystem talk about being the “single pane of glass,” but with competing products, Dell and VMware cannot both claim that title. How will this affect their relationship?

With VMware’s acquisition of DynamicOps — one of Dell’s key software partners — what happens to their OEM agreement? Remember, DynamicOps’ early success was in part due to its partnership and OEM agreement with Dell. Dell has been licensing key technologies from DynamicOps for its vStart cloud environment and its Virtual Integrated System (VIS), Dell’s multihypervisor approach to managing clusters of Dell hardware.

With VMware and Dell moving from a synergistic partnership to becoming more directly competitive, what will happen to that licensing agreement down the road?

At the end of the day While it was a surprising move, DynamicOps sounds like an excellent acquisition for VMware. It takes off the table what could be a key competitive technology in the hands of another big player. It brings a very synergistic technology that can add multihypervisor support to VMware’s vCenter Operations, which brings configuration, performance management, and capacity management to heterogeneous virtual machine operations. And it adds support for cloud environments to span multiple virtualization platforms as well as physical infrastructures — a new feature for VMware.

If VMware can move beyond its hopes of vSphere domination and broaden its management stack to include Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms and physical environments, then the company will continue to hold a top leadership position, even with new competition from the likes of Dell and its Quest portfolio.

This article, “VMware opens up to multihypervisor support with acquisition of DynamicOps,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.