4 days. 115 degrees outside. 20,000 of my closest virtualization
friends. VMworld Las Vegas
was quite an experience. The Platform Computing booth was busy from
start to finish with a demo of our award-winning
Platform ISF private cloud (IaaS) management solution.
From attending the keynotes and speaking with attendees, I had 5 key takeaways from the event:
Gone are the days of
having to start every conversation by explaining the difference between
virtualization and private cloud. Of
course this is a self-selected group but the education level has dramatically
increased. We had many people stopping
by to discuss their private cloud initiatives and how to get started.
2. VMware licensing has upset many
The new
vSphere 5 licensing has caused many companies to reevaluate their
dependency on VMware. The recent price
increases had disrupted their planning and created additional fears about being
locked in to a costly hypervisor (vCloud = vLockIn). VMware management tools manage VMware ESXi
hypervisor--and that's it. There is a
real fear of being locked into a specific stack and/or being required to
upgrade to more expensive packages with lots of unnecessary functionality.
3. Multi-hypervisor is real
Even before the
price increase, users have been evaluating a mixed hypervisor strategy. A common discussion is VMware’s closed
support at the management layers. VMware
is viewed as the gold standard when considering virtualizing production
applications. End users already have or
are seriously considering adding KVM (Platform is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance)
and to a lesser extend Xen into their roadmaps for non-production use cases
(for example dev and test). These offer
great density at lower cost.
4. The rise of application-centric thinking
In the early days of
private clouds, most of the focus was on the transient IT services such as an
OS or VM. Typical end users were
developers needing access to standardized IT environments. Most of our conversations included
discussions about additional levels of an application stack – including the
middleware, application logic, and post-provisioning scripting. In summary, an application-centric
private cloud. By standardizing IT
service definitions to include these levels and automating delivery, companies
can effectively define their own PaaS. While we position Platform ISF primarily as IaaS management, many of our customers think we are selling the solution short. Customers are using it to define and provision their own PaaS and SaaS applications.
Ironically this was a major focus of VMware’s messaging, albeit in a
hosted PaaS environment. Most of our
larger enterprise customers want to tightly integrate their on-premise data
center infrastructure and security systems into an on-premise personalized
PaaS.
5. Physical is part of cloud
When one thinks
cloud, the natural mental model = virtualization. However, I was surprised by the number of
conversations where end users want to add integrated physical
provisioning. Sometimes the focus
was for standalone bare metal provisioning.
But as we move more towards an application-framework, there are
components in the app stack such as the database server that might only exist
on a physical system for scalability and performance. Operating within this mixed environment is a
core requirement to deal with both non-production transient IT services as well
as production apps with flexing and stringent service level agreements (SLA).
At Platform
Computing, we are not cloud washing our products. On top of being named the #1 vendor by
Forrester, we received the Best
of VMworld Finalist award for Private Cloud Management.
Were you there? What were your takeaways?
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