cloud broker – Think©Loud

Last week VMware launches its new product: VMware Go. This is a product that is specifically targeted at the SMB market. A clever move by VMware to expand its market share of virtualization in the SMB segment. VMware already is the market leader in virtualization when it comes to enterprise companies. But in the SMB segment has competitors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer or RedHats KVM.

Not only cost is a factor that stops SMB companies from entering the path of virtualization. Also the lack of resources and knowledge about virtualization is something most SMB companies don’t have. With Go VMware tries to simplify the proces of virtualization. It provides a management interface to VMware ESXi from the Go cloud.

Eric Sloof over at NTPRO.NL points to a YouTube video where Dave McCrory, founder and CTO of Hyper9, explains how VMware Go works.

The picture above shows the same explanation of VMware Go as Dave McCrory gives in his video. What shows is that management takes place, through a web interface, from the workstation where the administrator is located. Everything will be managed from the VMware Go cloud. The ESXi hosts are connected to the Go cloud by installing a proxy admin desktop. This desktop will service the Go cloud a management interface for the ESXi host.

This is a rather new concept of managing servers. Normally a client-server management model is applied to this kind of infrastructure services. VMware vCenter, the current management tool for vSphere infrastructures, is an example of a this type of management model.

The question is : Is this the first of step into moving vSphere management into the cloud?

This may seem like a far fetched idea, but is it? We are now living in the world of cloud computing. Lets look at the same picture as above, but introduce the vCloud concept into this equation.

Here you can see the same concept as the picture above. The proxy desktop has been replaced by an VMware Go Proxy appliance which is for managing the ESXi host in you (local) private vSphere cloud. There is a connection between the Private vSphere cloud and the vCloud(s) provided the various VMware hosting partners. All this can be managed from a central point : the VMware Go cloud.

If the name will still be the same isn’t important, call it vCenter Cloud Edition (CE), it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the fact that you now have central point of management to control your hybrid cloud. Not only can you manage your private cloud, but from the same interface you can manage you various vCloud partners (or even non-VMware) cloud services. This makes the VMware vCenter Cloud Edition a cloud broker to manage all your IaaS cloud services. Maybe even with integration to manage PaaS or SaaS solution. One cloud to rule them all 😉

Will this become reality? Only time will tell.

My personal opion: I like the idea of cloud brokers. I don’t think that one (cloud) provider / solution can serve all the cloud services needed by a company. So in my opinion cloud brokers will become the next battleground in cloud land. That’s why I like the idea of a central management cloud broker solution. That’s why I like the idea of a vSphere vCenter Cloud Edition.

What do you think?

RedHat has launched a new open-source project in relation to Cloud Computing : the Delta Cloud. It can be seen as a cloud broker between the end-user access device and the various clouds computing solutions today. Currently each cloud provider is introducing it’s own API to interact with. RedHat’s Delta Cloud now tries to fill this gap by introducing a open-source project which will act as a doorway to multiple clouds. Currently public clouds like Amazons EC2 and solutions based on RedHat Enterprise Virtualization based private clouds are supported. Support for VMware based private clouds and Rackspace will be added soon.

For more information about the subject go to the Deltacloud projet site here.

Purpose of this Delta Cloud is to protect applications agains “cloud API changes and incompatibilities”. It should create a an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across the public and private clouds available today. For example : You can start building applications build through the Delta Cloud API in your private cloud. And without any changes move this application to a public cloud. Interoperability in your hands!