VMware aims to merge private and public clouds

In a sense, VMware's VDC-OS is already on the market, since it simply aggregates all of their existing products, says Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Bowker. The technology upgrades VMware is discussing this week could be available in the second quarter, Bowker says, when the company is expected to launch VMware Infrastructure 4, the next version of its core platform which includes the ESX Server, high availability software, backup technology, dynamic scheduling, live migration and other components.

VMware's Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets, says the nation's economic problems are pushing customers toward VMware's core propositions of increasing utilization of existing IT resources and doing so in a way that quickly deploys new computing capacity to end users.

"Especially in this economic climate, people are ready for a change," Chu says. "They're frustrated by the amount of IT spend and maintenance. Customers are ready for computing as a service ... IT that's available on demand."

The vCloud API, which is in private release for service providers and software vendors, allows applications to be moved from private data centers to external cloud services without being rewritten. Companies that will provide cloud services with vCloud include SAVVIS, SunGard, Telefonica, Telstra and Terremark.

So far, VMware is saying that its various management tools will only work on top of the VMware hypervisor. In other words, physical servers and servers virtualized by MicrosoftMicrosoft, or any other vendor will not be compatible with the VDC-OS. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de