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.
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