VMworld 2012: Back To The Future (Of The Datacenter): A Management Odyssey

Summary: Dave Bartolleti reflects on VMWorld 2012 and VMWare's push to return to the future of the datacenter.

I had a great time, as always, at VMworld last week. My seventh time was busier than ever. If I had to summarize my gut feeling about this year, it was VMwares return to the future of the datacenter. Yes, there was plenty of cloud-ness, but the main thrust of VMwares message was: theres a lot left to virtualize, encapsulate, and mobilize in the datacenter, and were the best company to help you do itwhether or notyoure heading for the clouds.Thecloud isnt everything, nor should it be. Its one ofmany pathsto a more efficient, responsive, and available IT infrastructure. Companies arent going from datacenters and managed services to the cloud in one monolithic transition. Theyre looking at everything from their virtualized workloads to their big databases to their productivity apps and asking two questions: can I run them cheaper, faster and better in house first? And, when will it make more sense to run them in my or someone elses cloud? Part of that decision is cost will cloud save money?

A bigger question, though, is: Who decides? Will application teams and app developers go to the cloud themselves, without waiting for IT? In many cases, they already are. Or will todays virtualization admins lead the way? VMwares betting on both, and used VMworld this year to arm its core audienceVMware adminswith a strategy.My colleague Glenn ODonnell calls VMwares core audience theIlluminati (heh)and VMworld is certainly designed for them.

So is the newunified vCloud Suite, combining vSphere, vCenter Operations Management (with config and capacity rolled in last year) and vCloud Director into a complete virt+cloud management stack.Thats a lot of boxes, but VMware has to do it: as the hypervisor itself gets less sticky, and ascompetition catches up, VMware has to both broaden and simplify the management story to arm datacenter admins with enough of the right tools to not only create a killer private cloud but get their application environments ready for a public cloud.The vCloud Suite, combined with the DynamicOps and Nicira acquisitions, gives VMware a story for virtualization of every existing datacenter tier (and the foundation for thesoftware-defined datacenter), plus the connectors and lifecycle management tools to mobilize workloads to public IaaS platforms. Of course, the acquisitions also herald anew era of openness at VMware, with OpenStack also on the horizon.

vCloud Suite is still obviously a marketecture at this point. The acquisitions were just wrapped up a few weeks ago, so Ill give them a pass, but Im looking forward to some real guidance on when and how each should box is going to be built, integrated, and deployed. Which VMware orchestrator, service manager, and lifecycle tools have won the day? Which acquired management tools (and there are plenty) will quietly fade away? Im hoping to hear more on this from Barcelona.

And if you needed any more evidence that the VMware Illuminati still call the shots at VMworld, look at the two vendors that won theTechTarget Best of VMworld 2012awards Management category, New Technology category,andBest of Show:IntiguaandHotlink. Intigua virtualizes and encapsulates management agents, those bugbears of every admins life; HotLink lets you manage Hyper-V and other VM typesincluding AWS instancesfrom vCenter seamlessly. Im impressed by both companies and have been diving deeper on both recentlythese products are simple, laser-focused, easy to understand and demo, and designed to make real-world, everyday management of virtual environments simpler, faster, and less of a mess. Period.

For VMware, though, this was a management & strategy show, not a product show.Rounding out the news, VMware also announcededucation and advisory servicesand enhancedofferings for SMBs. And Dave Johnson covers theView-related content with his usual flair here. Finally, just for the record,Im neutral about the shift back to processor-based pricing. The backlash was fierce, and it was right to listen to customers, but I still dont think counting physical infrastructure is the way to license for the next generation of datacentersorclouds. Its clear vRAM wasnt the way either, though.

Next for VMware?Focus, focus, focus. Where does the company want to win? The current answer is everywhere: datacenter and cloud, packaged apps and new apps, the entire systems management stack, admins and developers, virtualized storage, software-defined networking, and the virtual desktop. Thats a lot of simultaneous vectors to juggle, a lot of established competitors to chase, a lot of partners to woo, and a lot of new acquisitions to pull together. Over to you, Pat!

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VMworld 2012: Back To The Future (Of The Datacenter): A Management Odyssey