VMware Highlights Enterprise Clouds With vSphere 5

VMware (previous CloudAve coverage), the leader in virtualization space with some interesting cloud moves, recently announced Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite, a repackaged version of their offerings targeting the enterprise market and service providers. VMware has been struggling to get their cloud infrastructure services game going even though their PaaS and SaaS strategy are in strong footing. With vCloud Express failing to make an impact in the service provider market, this repackaging could help them in the enterprise market where the commodity cloud is still is still looked down as risky.

Let us be honest folks, we cannot expect organizations to embrace commodity servers based public clouds overnight. There are many reasons for this and chief among them are:

Businesses are generally risk averse when it comes to their IT. They cannot change their mindset and embrace hardware failures as a way of life and design for them. It is going to take a long time before we see the mind shift
Most of the organizations still have legacy applications and expecting them to throw them away and embrace applications written for cloud overnight is naive
We cannot expect enterprises to throw away their infrastructure investments and move to commodity clouds even if the economics is very attractive. It is going to take time

As Simon Wardley pointed out in Twitter and elsewhere, a class of clouds called enterprise cloud is going to exist in the foreseeable future as organizations transition from a mindset based on powerful and reliable servers to commodity servers based clouds. During this period, we are going to see traditional infrastructure players package their offerings to meet the needs of these customers. What VMware is doing is to protect their existing cash cow while catering to the users who are still not comfortable with commodity clouds.

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite bundles up vSphere 5, vShield 5, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 and vCloud Director 1.5. The new versions of these products have some interesting features targeted towards enterprises who want high availability, security, high performance, etc.. Some of the exciting features of this suite are:

VMware vSphere 5 will support virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. These VMs will be able to process in excess of 1 million I/O operations per second, which will far surpass the requirements of even the most resource-intensive applications. The I/O part is pretty impressive especially with complaints about the I/O performance in Amazon’s commodity cloud
New Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS features can save a customer with a 1,000-VM environment up to a full year of administrator time
vShield 5 has seen great improvements and the new Data Security capabilities that will enable IT to quickly identify risk exposures resulting from unprotected sensitive data, isolate applications with different levels of trust and migrate security policies as data and applications move between different virtual systems and apply the same policies in public clouds
New Linked Clone capability (which according to my Twitter stream has been present for sometime now) reduces the provisioning time to 5 seconds
A change in the licensing model based on vRAM instead of CPU. It is high time they changed the licensing model from the per CPU pricing. However, Jo Maitland of TechTarget is arguing that this new model adds cost to cloud.

Personally, I don’t see VMware to be a strong player in the cloud infrastructure space. I see them as a major player in PaaS and their recent SaaS acquisitions offers some clues to their strategy on the application services side. However, they are not going to let their existing infrastructure cash cow (which is still huge) go without a fight. The recent announcement is part of this strategy and we will have to wait and see how it plays out.