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VMware Details Road Map for the Virtual Data Center
By Alex Handy

September 17, 2008 — VMware has announced its plans to offer a Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS).

At its conference in Las Vegas, the company detailed a road map that included new capabilities, services, tools and monitoring systems, all working towards the goal of running as a single entity a room full of computers. These clouds of computers would mesh with external clouds for complete enterprise cohesion, according to VMware's road map.

The VDC-OS will run applications, user desktops, servers and mobile devices as virtualized instances spun out and controlled by the single underlying data center operating system. To this end, VMware described the future of vStudio, its developer suite. vStudio can now build vApp packages, Open Virtual Machine Format (OVMF) stacks of software and applications, and the additional controls and policies surrounding them.

OVMF was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force standards organization in August, and it includes descriptions of the hardware being virtualized as well as the software. VMware has extended the format to include policy information and creation tooling in a beta of its vStudio software early last week.

Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware, said, “Today, when you deploy an application, you're deploying multiple virtual machines together. vApp describes a multi-tier application, and along with that, you attach policies that say, 'This application should be backed up once every two days,' or, 'This application can only talk on port 753.' You can do this in vStudio, or you can manually create it as well.” Both of these tools will available in VMware's cloud-computing future.

One meta-step down the stack sits the idea behind VMware's vCloud initiative. This newly announced push seeks continuity among clouds. The VDC-OS will allow machines to be pushed around among clouds of VMware systems hosted in different locations and on different cloud instances. These systems would also virtualize file systems, messaging queues and existing hypervisors, and the company is aiming for a future where clouds both inside and outside of enterprises can cooperate and interchange work.

The company also said that there will be APIs and frameworks for developing directly to the VDC-OS. All of this should roll out in 2009, according to Raghuram.

“People believe in virtualization,” said Raghuram. “This is just further evidence of the legs left in virtualization and how we're extending it to solve a whole area of problems.”

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, data centers, virtualization, VMware

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