VMware Adds Automation to Cloud IT Services

vCloud Request Manager adds automation via workflows to the provisioning process of vCloud Director.

As it previewed in September at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware now has added new cloud computing products and services to its catalog, making the announcements at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen on Oct. 13.

Not only that, but the company also is making it easier for customers to pay for virtual infrastructure services by simplifying the pricing model.

All of VMware's new cloud infrastructure products and services run on VMware's bread-and-butter vSphere platform. The new management controls include those for general management, security (three separate products), data center services and outside consulting services.

Various configurations of the new offerings can provide a hybrid cloud computing system that is able to incorporate private and public clouds.

VMware's new IAAS (infrastructure-as-a-service) package consists of four components: access to a cloud-based version of VMware vSphere, upon which application developers can build their own services; access to VMware vCloud Director, which enables deployment of prepackaged cloud services; vCenter Server, which provides scalability management of hard-to-control virtualized environments; and vCenter Chargeback, which provides for automated chargebacks in private cloud environments.

A chargeback in an enterprise channels the cost of a cloud service to the department or departments which use the service, keeping the accounting clean and simple at all times.

In Copenhagen, the company introduced vCloud Request Manager, which adds automation to the provisioning process of vCloud Director.

vCloud Director extends the resource pooling capabilities of vSphere to enable the creation of so-called virtual data centers, so IT can in turn offer services to its users through fully automated self-service access.

Once a user selects infrastructure as a service from the vCloud Director service catalog, vCloud Request Manager initiates predefined workflows to coordinate all the approvals, track software license inventories and ensure standardization of cloud partitions according to preordained company policies.

VMware's new, much more granular IAAS pricing will start later in October. It will be based on the amount of memory used in hourly increments allocated to a specific virtual machine. Previously, it was based on a per-virtual machine basis, no matter how much memory it was using to handle the workload.

The new allocated memory pricing model is only available for IAAS, VMware said.