VMware Maps Out Its Future at VMworld 2008

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At VMworld 2008 Monday, VMware’s (NYSE: VMW) user conference being held through Thursday in Las Vegas, the virtualization giant unveiled strategies aimed squarely at the enterprise amid a backdrop of increasing competition from players like Microsoft.

Those strategies center around VMware’s Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), its combination of infrastructure, application and cloud services for the datacenter. They also include its vCloud cloud computing initiative and VMware View, the development of VMware’s client virtualization platform.

Products supporting these efforts, as well as ancillary applications developed by VMware partners, will begin hitting the market in 2009, Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior director of product management, told InternetNews.com.

In addition to extending VMware’s virtual infrastructure capabilities to fend off growing challenges from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the offerings aim to better position VMware’s tools as a way for datacenter managers to cut costs by leveraging clusters of inexpensive co

VMware also seeks to open the door to heavy involvement from its partners, who are becoming increasingly important to the vendor. That’s especially true with Microsoft’s burgeoning presence in the virtualization market tempting many VMware partners to also team up with the Redmond, Wash. giant to hedge their bets.

Each of VMware’s upcoming offerings is designed to provide a different piece of the puzzle for datacenter managers, it said.

“VMware Infrastructure Services, part of VDC-OS, seamlessly aggregates servers, storage and networks as a pool of on-premise cloud resources,” Balkansky said.

Meanwhile, the vCloud initiative “will let customers seamlessly integrate multiple datacenters or federate internal datacenters with clouds offsite,” while VMware View, the vendor’s universal client strategy, will “let the user take his personal workspace with him wherever he goes and access his data and applications from any end point device,” Balkansky said.

Leveraging the datacenter OS

With VDC-OS, VMware aims to offer “a comprehensive way to abstract, aggregate and allocate servers, storage and the network in the datacenter, not just servers,” Balkansky said. It is also building a set of services to help applications with availability, security and scalability, he said.

VMware’s partners will be heavily involved in building out some of the capabilities of VDC-OS, Balkansky added.

By aggregating servers, storage and networks, VDC-OS creates “an internal cloud inside the datacenter,” which will enable customers to leverage inexpensive, commodity x86 hardware, Balkansky said.

“Everybody has heard Google’s story about how they buy very cheap servers and have built this massively scalable datacenter that’s very resilient,” Balkansky added. “We’re enabling this type of efficiency and lights-out automation for any customer, not just for Google.”

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