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InfoQ Homepage News VMware Revealed a Push Toward Cloud and Open Source at Its Recent VMworld 2014 Conference

VMware Revealed a Push Toward Cloud and Open Source at Its Recent VMworld 2014 Conference

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VMware revealed a push toward cloud and open source at its recent VMworld 2014 conference

At the VMworld 2014 conference, VMware announced that they will deliver an OpenStack product, VMware Integrated OpenStack, using VMware software components for storage, networking and management. This will ship in the first half of 2015. The company has been a member of the OpenStack Foundation since late 2012, and has focused on OpenStack support for its technologies such as vSphere and VMware NSX. It now has over 30 developers working on OpenStack.

The company revealed a partnership program with Docker, Google and Pivotal to make building and deploying Docker on vSphere and vCloud Air easy, and to improve integration with their products. They will also integrate Google’s Docker orchestration product Kubernetes. Docker has often been pitched as “lightweight virtualization”, and so could be seen as a threat to VMware’s business in the long run, although it is currently missing the secure isolation that virtualization provides. It is also becoming a standardized way to ship products with all their dependencies.

VMware also announced the purchase of CloudVolumes, a three-year old startup. They provide an application management system that separates applications into application code, per user configuration and data. The idea is that the raw application can be provisioned very fast to a VM on demand, bypassing the install and provisioning processes. They call this “application management containers”, in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of Docker.

They also released a fast deployment for virtual machines called Project Fargo. It is a copy on write technology for virtual machines, enabling a new virtual machine to be created in under a second from an existing one, a technology also known as VM fork. The new machine does not have to be on the same host. VMware is saying that this gives the speed of containers with the security of virtual machines.

Many reactions have been negative. Lydia Leong of Gartner said “There’s a heavy overtone of reassurance that the VMware faithful can continue to do business as usual, partaking of some cool new technologies in conjunction with the VMware infrastructure that they know and love … But a huge majority of the new agile-mode IT is cloud-native. VMware needs to find ways to be relevant to the agile-IT mode.”

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