VMware: Hey, Other Cloud Services Exist 39
Nerval's Lobster writes "VMware has updated its cloud-management portfolio to support alternative tools, including Amazon's platform. That's a big step for the company, which for some time seemed to shy away from the idea of backing heterogeneous cloud environments. VMware's vFabric Application Director 5.0 is designed to, in the company's words, 'provision applications on any cloud.' That includes Amazon's EC2. The platform includes pre-approved operating system and middleware components for modeling and deploying those aforementioned applications, with the ability to use the platform's blueprints for deploying applications across 'multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures.' The other platform, vCloud Automation Center 5.1, enables 'policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services.'"
It's quite possible that this move is in response to Microsoft building similar functionality into Hyper-V 2012.
App Director (Score:2, Insightful)
App Director is a pretty interesting product. It's rather different from other offerings from VMWare, but it's not a game changer and it's definitely not the future of the company. It's yet another product in the zillions that the company has. VMWare needs to focus. They seem to have lost a sense of direction since the hypervisors have become more of a commodity.
App Director is a nice Flash-based GUI for Chef, which is really the engine underneath doing the heavy lifting. And no, it does not support any other cloud other than Amazon and vCloud Director. It seems to me that VMWare is adding support for Amazon in a couple of their products so they can say "you see?, we do believe in multiple clouds". Should I call it Cloudwashing? There are other more interesting start-ups out there doing similar things like RightScale, Cliqr or GigaSpaces' Cloudify, all of which focus on the applications vs. the VMs. The problem is that I have a hard time believing that VMWare will ultimately abandon the "VM" as the way they see the world.