VMware tries to expand throughout the datacenter

New VMware products help customers build a "virtual datacenter operating system" and extend virtualization to storage and network equipment

The alerts will appear in vCenter, an updated version of VMware's Virtual Center management suite also planned for 2009. VMware will release an API that storage vendors can use to give visibility into vStorage from their own management tools, Balkansky said. VCenter will also gain new modules including CapacityIQ, ConfigControl, and Orchestrator.

Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group, said vNetwork could heal a divide between server and network administrators. Virtualization has "built a wall between server admins and network admins," he said. "The network guys were never really comfortable with the virtualization guys having this hidden, virtual network that they didn't have visibility into. This changes that and lets the network guys manage a virtual network like any other."

VMware is opening its architecture more to other vendors, Wolf said. "One of the things that has been going well for Citrix with their XenServer product is that its architecture is probably the most open in the industry. I think this is a good start for VMware, though further opening their storage architecture would help as well," he said.

VCloud is a set of technologies that let hosting providers like BT and T Mobile turn their datacenters into cloud environments, Balkansky said. It will also allow customers to connect their datacenters to those clouds, so they can move virtual environments off their own premises if they want them hosted by a third party.

"We'll build a set of APIs that will allow customers to extend a virtual machine from their on-premise infrastructure out into the cloud. It's like Vmotion for moving a virtual machine from an internal to an external data center and back again, while still having those policies for availability and security attached." Vmotion is VMware's existing technology for moving running virtual machines from one physical server to another.

Use of vCloud will start with "baby steps," Balkansky acknowledged. "We see interest from large companies that want to be able to rent some of their overflow capacity to others, it will probably start there, and it will start with the kind of noncritical workloads you would be comfortable delegating to a third party."

VMware wants to be seen as less of a pure infrastructure provider and more as a company that helps businesses deliver applications more reliably to end-users, Wolf said. VDC OS "gives them a message they can use to combat Microsoft, because Microsoft has been building a strong story around the end-user and the application and how that relates to the virtual infrastructure."

The products for improving application performance will include VMware Fault Tolerance, for ensuring transactions continue in the event of a server failure, and VMware Data Recovery, a basic backup and recovery tool. To help applications scale better the company will provide the ability to add new CPUs and memory to a virtual machine without having to restart it, and it will increase the amount of CPUs and memory a virtual machine can access to eight CPUs and 256GB of RAM, from four CPUs and 64GB today, Balkansky said.