OK, I admit it: I’m looking forward to VMworld like a kid looks forward to camp. But for exactly the opposite reason: VMworld marks the end of summer and the beginning of the fall tradeshow season. Summer, despite its all-American goodness, is an odd time for our industry—no less busy due to fall preparations, but devoid of the big moves, vision and ideas that make it exciting. That’s saved for the fall, when everyone is back from the beach and ready to listen.

So, if you’re ready to listen, you’re likely to hear the following themes emerging at VMworld 2010:

From cap ex to op ex

VMware practically owns the franchise on the cap ex value proposition, having proven that the hypervisor hath no equal when it comes to reeling in server spending. VMware CEO Paul Maritz has signaled a heavier emphasis on the op ex side of the equation. Why? I suspect two reasons:

• Virtualization is a cap ex boon and an op ex bust—as compute capacity is made available by the hypervisor, it’s quickly filled in with new machines. The result? An explosion in the number of machines that need to be managed—and an explosion in operating expense.
• The often-forgotten fact that cap ex represents less than 30 percent of overall IT spending. The larger share of cost savings—higher on the mind of the CIO—is operating expense.

Consequently, op ex is emerging as the new cap ex and will get considerable attention this year.Renewed emphasis on business value Continue reading…

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), today announced that it has formed a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The “Open Cloud Standards Incubator” will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management.

No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator was formed as part of the DMTF Standards Incubation process, which enables like-minded DMTF members to work together and produce informational specifications that can later be fast-tracked through the standards development process. The incubation process is designed to foster and expedite open, collaborative, exploratory technical work that complements the DMTF mission to lead the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. The current incubator leadership board consists of: Continue reading…

VMware, Inc. today announced VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice. As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 4 will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment.  Any application – an existing enterprise application or a next-generation application – runs more efficiently and with guaranteed service levels on VMware vSphere 4.  For enterprises, VMware vSphere 4 will bring the power of cloud computing to the datacenter, slashing IT costs while dramatically increasing IT responsiveness.  For hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures.  Over time, VMware will support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling “private” cloud environments that span multiple datacenters and/or cloud providers. … Continue reading…

In a rather bold move, VMware open sourced their VMware View Client (formerly VMware VDI Client), a client for virtual desktop infrastructure. VMware View Open Client is the name and lets you connect from a Linux desktop to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View. It is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (LGPL v 2.1).

Anyone can download, use, modify and distribute VMware View Open Client under the terms of the LGPL v 2.1. The source code is hosted at google code, so probably there’s a relationship between the two that we didn’t hear about yet.

The client has been optimized for thin client devices and VMware encourage their partners to use this open source software to develop clients fo non-x86 platforms, or operating systems other than Windows XP/e or Linux (read Mac OS X and mobile platforms). Continue reading…