VMware Vshpere Launch at Bangalore

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Vmware did a launch of their greatest and latest Vsphere product in Bangalore. It was a low key affair with a 2 page print out of the product and no usual goodie stuff. They did provide lunch even though this was a half day affair.

But the event otherwise was very good though the keynote speaker(Regional Director, India) didn't really bring out the story well. But the other Vmware speakers did a great job and you could see the passion and fire in their belly. It appears they have a solid portfolio to take over the Datacenter from the traditional players. The hardware platform that runs their software being the commoditized x86 servers, it is pretty much a play to dominate the Datacenters of the world. They claim that no workload is out of their scope now and with pretty efficient performance as well.

While they were clearly overshadowed by Amazon with their EC2 cloud services in the cloud space, they seem to have got some story around their products for the cloud. Key differentiator that they claim is in its ablity to move existing legacy applications to the cloud. With the Vsphere product, they can get your apps running in a private cloud within your datacenter which you can move to an external one that runs the same way from a control or management perspective. So you can also move it back and forth as needed, which seems to be a significant value in handling one of the problems of a cloud adoption. Wonder why they let Amazon lead the way in this space with all their infrastructure products.

They also claim Vsphere to be their Operating System for the cloud, though the analogy falls short of a Application Programming Interface(API) feature. Instead of limiting your apps to the resources to a single server resources in a traditional OS, now you have access to all the server resources virtualized and pooled by the Vsphere OS. And they seem to have build a suite of tools around it to get the feel of an OS running an application with all the gains that come out of a virtualized environment. You get a highly available, resource efficient infrastructure to run your apps which can be grouped as a vApp with a profile that can stick with it. But an API is a key part of the OS facility that seems to be missing and that can drive apps on this virtualized infrastructure. But surely, you get a feel that you can run an enterprise datacenter with vSphere.

There are products that can significantly change the rules of the game with their Vsphere portfolio. For example, the Fault Tolerant one where you run another VM lock step with the VM that runs your application, you virtually get the High Availability that is only possible with a highly redundant setup with significant application changes to make it truly available. It can potentially put many of the traditional HA products out of the Datacenter.

And they are driving every other technology in the space to innovate - Cisco has a virtual switch that would help network administrators see the VMs instead of just the servers. The vswitch is no more limited to the server, but the complete pool. Storage side also seems to have progressed further though I did not understand what EMC guy was talking about. In fact the EMC presentation was a poor one - they seem to talk more about virtualization than the storage innovations in the space. Storage vMotion looks cool as well.

Assuming that a complete domination is imminent, the management components of vSphere would potentially become a key piece in future. While Vmware is partnering with others in other spaces like storage and networking, it is interesting to note that they are going it alone with their management products. While every one of the big 4 management vendors have some virtualization support, I am not sure if they realize the opportunity here. They just seem to be riding on their existing customer base who would finally move away some day. So my take here is that infrastructure management space also would fall to Vmware ultimately if other management vendors don't pay attention. In a way, it is a good thing from a customer perspective because management vendors were just making money because infrastructure providers didn't pay much attention to the management aspect. So you could do away with the middlemen in between.

They pooh poohed the competition and at this point of time, they have every right to do it right now. This is a bit of a concern of another vendor dominating the datacenter which seems quite likely as things stand. It is high time others stepped up to get some balance in this space - it is extremely skewed in favor of Vmware right now. Makes one wonder why the hard core research groups of other infrastructure vendors who had most of the technology already missed this huge opportunity.

So it is very obvious that they are attacking the Datacenter, not just the server piece, the whole gamut around it - network, storage and more importantly, the management piece. The holistic approach seems like a sure shot at dominating the Datacenters in the years to come! It is a matter of time before the Datacenters fall to Vmware's advances!