VMware Delivers on Enterprise Class Cloud Promise

Most IT organizations are going to approach hybrid cloud computing from the perspective of their data centers out. After all, they’ve already made substantial investments in existing IT systems.

With that idea in mind VMware (VMW) today extended the scope of the VMware vCloud Air initiative by adding new disaster recovery capabilities, the ability to support hundreds of virtual network connections, and announced the general availability of the VCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service.

Scott Collison, vice president for the hybrid platform at VMware, said that while public clouds have been widely used to test and deploy stand-alone applications, it’s clear that the move to hybrid clouds is being driven by a desire to extend the reach of existing IT environments into the cloud. Given those requirements, most enterprise IT organizations are looking for the cloud service that most seamlessly provides those extensions.

Invariably, one of the first applications that IT organizations look to the cloud for is disaster recovery. Configurable in less than an hour, the VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery service can now be used to bi-directionally replicate virtual machines and data between VMware vCloud Air and an on premise data center. In addition, customers now have the option of rolling back to multiple recovery points while also defining recovery playbooks by invoking a new vRealize Orchestrator DR plug-in, open source DR Command Line Interface (CLI) or an expanded REST API.

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For large enterprise IT organizations, Collison added that VMware is expanding the number of virtual networks it can service as well. But Collison said the most sought after capability is likely to be the on demand capability, which as a beta was significantly over subscribed. Most IT organizations, said Collison, want to have both the option to deploy application workloads at a fixed prices, while also having the ability to invoke additional compute resources as needed to handle sudden spikes in demand for particular application workloads.

When added all up it’s clear that VMware is moving to create a cloud service that has particular appeal to enterprise IT organizations. There’s no shortage of public cloud options. But when it comes to public cloud services based on VMware the number of options available becomes quite limited. VMware is betting that rather than manage all the hybrid cloud computing issues that arise when trying to marry VMware running on premise to any number of other virtual machine platforms in the cloud, most enterprise IT organizations are going to opt for a cloud service that is a more natural extension of what they already know how to manage on premise.