VMware Rolls Out 2009 Roadmap

As part of a major product overhaul, VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) described its plans to add thin provisioning and cloud-based services to its virtualization offerings on the first day of its VMworld show today.

With VMware under increasing pressure from Citrix and Microsoft, which recently launched Hyper-V technology, the vendor is putting its faith in its Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS).

It’s evolving [our] VMware Infrastructure [product],” says Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior director of product marketing. “It allows companies to aggregate hardware -- server, storage, and network.”

VDC-OS is essentially the vendor’s existing VMware Infrastructure offering with a raft of software tools built on top of it, encompassing the likes of thin provisioning and cloud computing. “Think of it as the existing VMware Infrastructure software, but with a bunch of new things that we’re announcing in 2009,” says Balkansky.

First up is vStorage, VMware’s first foray into thin provisioning, which the vendor claims can slash users’ storage requirements by up to 50 percent.“With thin provisioning, customers can lie to the VM [Virtual Machine] and give it 10 Gigs of virtual storage but two Gigs of physical,” says Balkansky, explaining that users are told when the VM is getting close to its capacity limits. “As time goes on, and the VM generates data, the admin will start to get alerts.”

At least one user is sold on the idea of VDC-OS, tying together the myriad strands of his virtualization effort.

“In my opinion, it’s all about the business value -- we can use one integrated set of infrastructure for both our Oracle and our Windows environment,” says Douglas Babb, a defense contractor at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah. “We’re in the midst of a very large server consolidation effort.”

VMware is also jumping on the cloud storage bandwagon in Las Vegas this week, announcing its forthcoming vCloud strategy, which is aimed at the likes of Amazon’s S3 service.

“We can migrate the VM out of your own data center to the data center of the cloud computing provider,” says Balkansky. “We’re working with these managed service or cloud service providers to build these capabilities that can be easily consumed by customers.”The cloud offering is just one of a spate of software tools that will be launched this week. VMware steadfastly refused to discuss pricing or specific launch dates other than ‘2009.’

Other offerings planned for next year include Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery, two tools for protecting and recovering applications, VMsafe for monitoring VMs, and VMDirectPath, which the vendor claims can boost network and storage I/O performance.

VMware is also looking to build network virtualization into the VDC-OS thanks to its vNetwork Distributed Switch, a software tool which uses server network interface cards (NICs) to quickly create virtual NICs.

“Users no longer have to configure an individual switch on every host,” says Balkansky, explaining that a single virtual switch could support up to 16 devices. “Imagine you’re a network admin -- isn’t it easier to manage one rather than 16 things?”

The vendor will also flesh out its virtual desktop strategy this week, announcing its ‘Client Virtualization Platform’ which it is touting as a way for users to streamline their management.“This will be a bare metal purpose-built virtualization layer for your laptop or desktop computer to run your VM,” says Jerry Chen, VMware’s senior director for enterprise desktop virtualization. “Now you can manage your mobile users and your server users side-by-side from the same common management platform.”

Currently VMware uses a set of different products for virtualization management, such as ACE for desktops, FUSION for Macs, and ThinApp for application virtualization.

Next year the vendor will launch two offerings for streamlining virtualization management; View Manager, which Chen claims will offer centralized management and View Composer for managing and provisioning virtual images.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.