VMware aims to merge private and public clouds

VMware's announcements continue its push for a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), a software layer that aggregates virtualized servers, storage and network resources into one big computing pool. VMware the VDC-OS last September and still has not announced a release date, but the company is providing further details on its capabilities this week.

VMware says end users should be able to provision their own virtual machines and applications in a that relies upon chargeback, configuration management, capacity planning, service catalogs and self-service portals.

Moreover, VMware's forthcoming technology will connect customer data centers to those of external , letting them provision and manage all internal and external virtualized resources through the VMware Infrastructure client. Related to this public-private connection is a "vCloud" API that ensures interoperability across public cloud services -- as long as they are built using VMware technology.

Rather than being an entirely new technology, the VDC-OS is mainly a new way of thinking about the capabilities of virtualization and how they might be extended throughout both public and private data centers, analysts say.

The VDC-OS is "more about marketing and getting people to think about the virtual infrastructure as the new operating system, and virtual machines as being application containers," says Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf. "VMware wants to lessen the relevance of the operating system and allow resource scheduling to be done by the virtualization layer."