What Will VMware Do With Its Growing Cloud Arsenal?

I used to think VMware was making a fundamental mistake by not uncoupling its hypervisor from all the surrounding tools such as management, orchestration, storage and the like. I feared IT wouldn't like the lock-in. I'm still correct, except the problem is not as fundamental as I imagined.

Instead of taking my advice VMware continued to build an integrated system of tools, a virtual and cloud ecosystem. All these tools puts VMware in direct conflict with an array of vendors, many of them currently close VMware partners.

Virtualization Review David Davis took a close look at VMware's key cloud tools and where they may go.

VMware vCenter Operations helps handle capacity and performance monitoring. Davis sees VMware's tool actually convincing shops they need this function, but it also competes with Xangati, Quest, VMturbo and Veeam.

On the storage side VMware Data Recovery is bundled with some vSphere offerings. This tool, since it only supports 100 VMs, is today aimed at SMBs. This offering competes with Vizioncore and Veeam.
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Then there's the vSphere Storage Appliance that "turned vSphere physical hosts into virtual storage arrays with redundancies and full vSphere support for advanced features," as Davis describes.

VMware has a networking offering in the vSphere Distributed Switch, which is both a firewall and virtual switch. Davis sees more and more network gear moving from physical to virtual. Will VMware ultimately tangle with Cisco?

Finally Davis looks at the broad area of cloud where vCloud Director along with vSphere lead the charge. Right now providers and IT use these to build public and private clouds. But what if VMware builds its own, and, say, offers an Infrastructure as a Service solution?

Just as Microsoft is selling its own cloud services, I think a VMware IaaS would be great for competition and hopefully innovation.

Posted by Doug Barney on 11/27/2012 at 12:47 PM