My Thoughts on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

My thoughts on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service: There was an announcement made last week about the new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service which will bring VMware Public Cloud Service to the masses later this year. There are a couple of posts from our own Virtualization Practice analysts which can be found here and here. Since there has been plenty of conversation about just what the vCloud Hybrid Service is, I am going to use this post to share my thoughts on the service itself.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

On Tuesday VMware announced their answer to the public cloud: the vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). One of the biggest hurdles for the roughly 500,000 VMware customers has been that their on-premise, private infrastructure isn’t directly interoperable with any sizable public clouds, like Amazon AWS or RackSpace. If you want to move towards a public or hybrid cloud model you need to add additional software, like Enstratius’ offerings or VMware’s own vCloud Automation Center.

Host Deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Host deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do you deploy the hypervisors in your company? There are several different choices from installing from a CD, network install and/or PXE, to name a few methods currently available. When there are not a lot of physical hypervisors to worry about the CD installation works just fine and the need for automated installation gets stronger in direct correlation to the number of hosts.

OpenStack and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.

EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Moment

EMC and VMware’s pivotal moment has officially spun off and the Pivotal Initiative, a big data and cloud platform company is slated to go public according to EMC CEO Joe Tucci while speaking with investors at an event in New York. EMC’s chief strategist and ex-CEO of VMware, Paul Maritz, who is leading the Pivotal Initiative, believes and expects it to be a billion dollar business within the next five years if they can get the $400 million initial investment needed to reach that goal. EMC will own 69 percent and VMware will own 31 percent with 1,250 employees and $300 million in revenue.