Some may think Project Redwood is dead but VMware is busy integrating its recent acquisitions while laying the groundwork for the cloudy future. While the VMware acquisitions like Springsource, Hyperic, RabbitMQ, Redis, GemStone, kept the pundit guessing for a while, we are slowly seeing some action around the acquisitions. VMware is expected to announce their vCloud Service Director (formerly codenamed Project Redwood) during VMWorld next month. vCloud Service Director is a set of VMware tools which will help enterprises move their existing VMware infrastructure into a private cloud and easily integrate with the public cloud based on VMware’s vCloud platform. Today’s announcement by VMware regarding Hyperic gives some clues regarding how VMware is planning to use their acquisitions in their plans for cloud domination.VMware took control of Hyperic, an open source server monitoring and IT management software, along with its Springsource acquisition. Today VMware announced the release of Hyperic 4.4 which is deeply integrated with their vCenter platform so that IT admins can seamlessly manage vSphere ESX and ESXi hosts so that they can easily address the problems related to application performance whether it is in a physical environment or virtual environment or private clouds. This clearly improves the effectiveness of IT by giving them an unified interface maximizing productivity.
Some of the advantages of Hyperic 4.4 includes
- Rapid Diagnosis of Virtualized Application Performance Problems
- Automatic Maintenance of Application Infrastructure Inventory
- Virtualization-Aware Alerting
- Application Virtualization Migration Assurance
- Automated Problem Resolution
- Virtualized Environment Event & Log Monitoring
My biggest worry was about VMware’s plans with Hyperic as it is an open source and I was wondering if VMware will allow Hyperic to play nice with other platforms. My discussion with them convinced me that they are serious about being open source and they strongly feel that it provides them a bigger opportunity than going in the other direction.
I think it is just a matter of time before VMware consolidates it position among the enterprises planning the cloud move. They have all the components right, from SpringSource for platform play to Hyperic to enhance their infrastructure play to GemStone and Redis in their plans for plans on the datastore front. They even have some interesting strategies with VMForce and Google App Engine. Next month’s VMWorld is going to be interesting in this regard.
WRT to your worries about VMWare and Open Source, it may be worth noting that the vCenter management capabilities added in 4.4 are only available in the Enterprise Version, not the Open Source version.