VMware Cloud offerings plans to take on AWS and other Cloud Services

VMware is the market leader in virtualization, but a forgotten name in Cloud. Famously the CEO said something in the essence that he is not worried about public cloud, but public clouds not running VMware. And that makes sense. AWS, the largest Public Cloud player, uses Citrix Zen and not VMware. Also a hoard of other Public Cloud provider like Rackspace and Linode uses Xen. Google uses Kernel-based Virtual Machine as hypervisor and Microsoft uses their own homegrown hyper-V. Thus you can see the none of the major Cloud players are on VMware technology, and that is surely worrying sign for VMware. VMware now plan to launch two Cloud services to compete with growing influence of AWS and other Cloud provides.

VMware did a press release and explained their plan. The plan is to empower the VMware partners to create private/hybrid/public cloud using VMware products and to lure the vCloud users into using their Public Cloud offering.

The company talks about two concrete offerings in the Cloud space:

1) VMware NSX

VMware said they will release a product called VMware NSX that will be a network virtualization product that will work seamlessly with VMware and non-VMware hypervisors and cloud management systems. This will help VMware clients with better managing their data centers. Exact technical details were lacking from the press release, so we will have to wait and see how this product looks like.

2)  VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service

A lot of enterprises already uses VMware vCloud in their data centers. So now when these enterprises venture into the Public Cloud, VMware’s plan is to give them direct access to VMware Public Cloud right from within the vCloud services. Thus it will be more like a Hybrid Cloud, where Private and Public Clouds are used at the same time. This reduces the risk for the companies, and as they are already familiar with the vCloud technology, they are more likely to go with the vCloud Hybrid Service than other Public Cloud services.

The challenge here for VMware will be to make these Public Cloud services seamlessly integrated with current vCloud architecture. Although controls will need to be provided so that separate security and privacy settings can be implemented depending on whether a virtual server is launched locally or in the Cloud Infrastructure. Also the controls should be easy enough, as AWS/Azure/etc. has set a high standards on easy-of-use. For now there are no technical details just marketing material, so lets see how good a job VMware does. Very exciting and we look forward to the launch of this service.