VMware Seeds Internal Clouds
VMware loves clouds so much it wants to help you build your own. VMware last year announced a broad strategy to help service providers build clouds, and for IT to do the same. Then these IT clouds can be linked to outside clouds so extra capacity doesn't require more internal servers -- just a fatter WAN connection.
The notion of an internal cloud may be a bit ahead of its time. We wanted to do a full cover story on how to build your own cloud but felt the tools weren't mature enough and IT not quite ready.
VMware hopes its latest cloud tool, vSphere 4, will offer a shortcut. This puppy used to be called VMware Infrastructure (I guess like Microsoft, VMware likes to change product names midstream), and helps IT build clouds based on virtual machines.
The main breakthrough of vSphere 4, as I understand it, is that IT can load up each server with more VMs. The overall idea is that all applications run as services across the virtual servers, stay up via heavy-duty fault tolerance, and always have the right amount of storage through thin provisioning.
Is this really a cloud or just a virtualized and efficient datacenter? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on April 22, 2009