VMware Has Launched vSphere, the OS of the Cloud

Posted by Abel Avram on Apr 22, 2009

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VMware has announced vSphere, dubbed the operating system of the cloud, a virtualization solution that helps business to transform their data centers into private clouds and moves VMware ahead in the virtualization market.

VMware vSphere intends to turn the data center into a cloud. VMware wants to help business to make good use of their present investments in the IT infrastructure by turning the data centers into private clouds. Instead of managing dozens or hundreds of individual systems, each with its own hardware, operating system and applications, vSphere gives companies one single ecosystem that hides the network, storage and computing details, and provides security, resource and application management in one package.

VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz, called the new solution “Always-on IT in a Box” because, he said:

You can take a relatively small configuration of servers, just a few servers, and put those on a scheduled maintenance basis, install everything, and if something breaks you don’t call somebody right away, you wait for your weekly or monthly visit and they will come in and replace it, because our software will self heal and keep running.

Besides helping businesses to create their own clouds, VMware is already working with customers like Terremark to transform their business model from selling computing power per server to selling CPU cycles and memory GBs, practically moving them into the cloud business model.

Another solution built on vSphere is based on the idea of relating the software installed to the person it is installed for and not to the hardware it runs upon. So, the person could use a thin client or a thick one, the hardware could be changed in time, the operating system it runs upon could be changed or updated, but the user should not be affected. That will be done with VMware vSphere and View by introducing a layer of abstractization through virtualization.

Current customers of VMware Infrastructure 3 are lured to upgrade to vSphere which promises reduced operational costs, greater efficiency and better control:

• About 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, further decreasing infrastructure cost per application.
• Up to 50 percent storage savings with VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, which minimizes storage overprovisioning by enabling virtual machines to consume storage only as needed. Accrued across all VMware vSphere customers, these storage savings would free up enough storage to save up to 50 times the number of pictures currently on Facebook.
• Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings with VMware Distributed Power Management which uses VMware VMotion to automatically place all virtual machines on as few physical servers as possible without compromising service levels, and power down physical servers that are not needed. The power savings with VMware Distributed Power Management across all VMware vSphere 4 customers over one year could power a country the size of Denmark for 10 days.

vSphere can manage the following configuration as one pooled resource:

• 32 physical servers with up to 2048 processor cores
• 1,280 virtual machines
• 32 TB of RAM
• 16 petabytes of storage
• 8,000 network ports

Prices start at $166 per processor or $995 for 3 physical systems.

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   Abiquo

   by Martin Perez

   If you want to turn your data center into a cloud, I would recommend abicloud from abiquo which is Open Source.

   Reply

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   Re: Abiquo

   by Jim Leonardo

   I haven't used abiquo, and have really no opinion on it. The sad fact is that I think a lot of the customers VMWare would be targeting are still very worried about using open source. This is not because of quality, usability, etc, but because of intellectual property concerns.

   Reply

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   Re: Abiquo

   by Jim Kaskade

   And what intellectual property concerns would that be?....given that I've seen the largest enterprises move to open source (e.g. Teradata powers the fortune 1000 with a new Susse Linux offering now). As long as there is a commercial entity willing to support the product....curious.

   Reply