VMware paves path to hybrid clouds with vCloud Integration Manager

Last week VMware introduced its latest weapon in the battle for cloud domination: the VMware vCloud Integration Manager. According to the company, the new tool should be battle ready and operational in the first quarter of 2012, and it’ll be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director-based clouds. It will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings, as well as help them scale to meet customer demand in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective manner.

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VMware said vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere, VMware vShield Edge, and VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services.

It will also include a Web-based portal to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle, and reseller management. Service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

“In production at service providers, Integration Manager will mostly be driven through API calls from the service provider’s customer portal or CRM systems. These are typically the ‘systems of record’ for customer data and product orders, with Integration Manager doing the detailed provisioning work,” writes Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services at VMware. “Integration Manager is also important for VMware’s reseller partners, many of whom are looking to add cloud services to their portfolios in order to be able to sell complete hybrid clouds (combinations of public and private clouds).”

Long established as the dominant player in the server virtualization market, VMware’s ESX hypervisor platform and vSphere solution have made it the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, with everyone else forced to play catch-up in features and functionality. As a result, most enterprise organizations have settled on VMware as the de facto standard for their server virtualization implementations. Since server virtualization is a major foundational component of cloud computing, most of these enterprise organizations have also been using VMware technology for their private cloud initiatives.

However, a large number of public cloud service providers have yet to bestow their blessing on VMware. In fact, many of these companies have turned to open source or less expensive framework solutions built on top of Xen, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V technologies. That reality has probably given VMware executives fits, and it’s more than likely one of the leading reasons for VMware’s creation of vCloud Integration Manager.

While VMware has dominated in the virtualized data center and grown its numbers within private clouds, questions remained as to what the company would do to gain ground within the public cloud market. Most organizations are still working on their private cloud initiatives, but the near future may be more about hybrid clouds as companies begin to expand their environments beyond the walls of their own data center.

Since hybrid clouds will most likely work best when enterprises and cloud service providers use the same infrastructure and virtualization technology, VMware needs to bring onboard as many cloud resellers and service providers as possible in order to remain on top. vCloud Integration Manager could become a key selling point for VMware in reaching this goal.

Lodge stated that in order to make it simple for resellers to package, price, and sell vCloud Powered or vCloud Datacenter services, vCloud Integration Manager would include the notion of a cloud reseller. He went on to say, “This capability allows a service provider to securely delegate provisioning to resellers. In turn, the resellers can directly and immediately provision and de-provision their own customers (via the API or Web GUI), without having to open tickets, send emails or make phone calls.”

The virtualization giant has already established a program to bestow upon service providers what it calls the vCloud Datacenter or vCloud Powered status. The vCloud Powered program requires the company’s Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Compliance with these requirements helps ensure that vCloud Powered services offer customers on-demand access to virtual infrastructure from a public cloud, a secure and robust platform, and application and API portability between their internal data centers and the vCloud Powered services of their choice. Currently, 94 clouds across 19 countries worldwide are offering services that already meet VMware’s criteria.

According to Lodge, VMware’s service provider business has increased more than 200 percent in 2011, which he claims is a testament to the momentum and growth seen by service providers in their VMware-based clouds. Now with vCloud Integration Manager in its arsenal, Lodge said VMware hopes to further accelerate that spike and profitability by reducing operational costs and opening up new routes to market.

I’m sure we’ll see and hear plenty more from VMware in this space at VMworld 2012 since the cloud has taken over larger and larger portions of the show ever since 2009.

This article, “VMware paves path to hybrid clouds with vCloud Integration Manager,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.