VMware Automates Its Cloud IT Services

At it previewed in September at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware has now added new cloud computing products and services to its catalogue, the company said at it VMworld Europe in Copenhagen.

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

Infrastructure As A Service

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 centre 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 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) 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 pre-packaged cloud services; vCenter Server, which provides scalability management of hard-to-control virtualised environments; and vCenter Chargeback, which provides for automated chargebacks in private cloud environments.

In an enterprise, a chargeback channels the cost of a cloud service to the department or departments who 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 centres so IT can, in turn, offer services to its users through fully automated self-service access.

Once a user selects IaaS from the vCloud Director service catalogue, vCloud Request Manager initiates pre-defined workflows to co-ordinate all the approvals, track software licence inventories and ensure standardisation of cloud partitions according to pre-ordained 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.