VMware Announces “Next Generation” of Virtualisation

September 16, 2008: At this week’s VMware World in Las Vegas, VMware has announced what it is dubbing “the next generation of virtualisation” with a roadmap of new products and technologies that build on its Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS).

VMware says that VDC-OS enables all types of hardware - servers, storage and network – to be pooled into an aggregated, on-premise cloud, which can also be extended on-demand with external clouds. The company says that VDC-OS datacentres are elastic, self-managing and self-healing.

VDC-OS expands virtual infrastructure along three dimensions. First, it delivers a set of infrastructure services to aggregate servers, storage and network as a pool of cloud resources and allocate them where they are needed most.

Next a set of application services which guarantee the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run, are applied. And third, the VDC-OS delivers a set of cloud services that federate compute capacity between the on-premise and off-premise clouds.

VMware says that unlike a traditional OS, which is optimised for a single server and supports only those applications written to its interfaces, the VDC-OS serves as the OS for the entire datacentre. It supports any application written to any OS, from legacy Windows applications to modern distributed applications that run in mixed operating system environments

In support of VDC-OS VMware has also announced vStorage - a set of new technologies and interfaces that it claims can provide better total cost of ownership and manageability for storage infrastructure in virtual environments.

“Storage is a critical building block in delivering the flexibility, speed, resiliency, and efficiency of the Virtual Datacenter OS,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions, VMware. “vStorage in combination with products from our storage partners automates handoffs between the VMware platform and the storage infrastructure, simplifies storage operations, and maximises efficient use of customers’ storage infrastructure.”

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