Virtually, anything is possible, says VMware

Las Vegas, USA: VMware lives up to its claim of ‘virtually, anything is possible' and unveils a virtual datacenter Operating System, kicking off what seems to be the 2.0 age of virtualization, besides partnering with Cloud computing biggies.

100 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are virtualized, but everyday, newer application development frameworks put an exceeding load on the application infrastructure, increasing the need for corporations -- big and small -- to either enhance the infrastructure rapidly, or in most common cases fueled by the 'more output from less investment' theory, make the existing infrastructure bear the extra load.

This was the underlying philosophy of VMworld 2008, organized by virtualization solutions provider VMware, at Las Vegas, Nevada, on September 16, with a keynote by President and CEO Paul Maritz.

Self-sufficient virtual data center

VMware announced a new, virtual data center operating system to sync up hardware resources like servers, storage and network, into a single aggregated, on-premise cloud, making data centers more flexible, self-managing and self-healing.

Also, it enables corporations to safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional computing capacity, as and when required by the IT to sustain business.

The solution functions in three steps: Firstly, it delivers a set of infrastructure services (Infrastructure vServices) which aggregates servers, storage and network as a bunch of on-premise cloud resources and allocate them to applications that need them most.

In the second stage, it delivers a set of application services (Application vServices) aimed at guaranteeing the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run.

Thirdly, the virtual operating system delivers a set of cloud services (Cloud vServices) that federate compute capacity between the on-premise and off-premise clouds.

Preventing downtime disasters

Within the Application vServices, Fault Tolerance, a new application service was launched, which aims at providing zero downtime, zero data loss availability to all applications against hardware failures without the cost and complexity of hardware or software clustering solutions.

Alternatively, VMotion and Storage VMotion allow companies to minimize planned downtime, while the Site Recovery Manager automates the fail over of an entire site, and VMsafe is aimed at providing an 'X-ray vision' into virtual machines in order to detect and stop previously undetectable viruses, rootkits and malware before they can infect a system.

Seeing sunshine in Cloud Computing

VMware also announced its vCloud initiative, with support from its 100-odd partners, in an attempt to deliver enterprise-class cloud computing, by federating compute capacity on demand between virtual datacenters and cloud service providers to support existing and new application loads.

In collaboration with partners across the industry, including BT, Rackspace, SAVVIS, SunGard, T-Systems, and Verizon Business, the VMware vCloud Initiative is aimed at helping companies – both large and small – safely tap compute capacity inside and outside their firewalls – how they want, when they want, and as much as they want – to ensure quality of service for any application they want to run, internally or as a service.

The vCloud has 3 offerings.First is the VMware Ready cloud services that use the benefits of VMware Infrastructure to deliver flexible enterprise class cloud, hosting, and managed services.

Second is a Ready Optimized cloud service that uses the Cloud vServices API, vApp technology, the OVF specification, and other VMware technologies to enable consistent mobility, provisioning, management, and service assurance of applications running in on-premise datacenters and in off-premise clouds, which are currently under development.

And thirdly, the VMware Ready Integrated cloud services that enable a common approach to integrated manageability between on-premise and external cloud environments as part of vCenter, VMware's management product line.