April 21, 2009

vSphere 4 steps up, falls short of the cloud

A bunch of great new features make vSphere 4 a whale of an upgrade. But a 'cloud operating system'?

Today's announcement of VMware vSphere 4 proved once again that I'm a sucker for futuristic-sounding technology. As soon as I saw the tag line "the industry's first cloud operating system," I was off. Whoa! They've done it! An OS-like layer that spans an entire datacenter of servers and lets you scale and allocate resources like Google, everyone's favorite model of IT nirvana!

Then I took a couple of deep breaths. Operating system? How could it be an operating system? That would mean people would have to write applications for a virtual machine, so you must still need to install operating systems on top of vSphere 4. So calling vSphere 4 an OS must be...a metaphor?

[ Check out all the news on VMware vSphere's launch. | For more on VMware in action, see InfoWorld Test Center reviews on "VMware Views is good news, bad news" | Get the real story on the cloud from whurley, InfoWorld's cloud computing blogger. Dave Marshall brings you nonstop coverage of virtualization in the Virtualization Report blog. ]

Well then, certainly, there must be some other huge breakthrough. Like no longer having to manage server instances as you scale? I asked our resident virtualization oracle, Executive Editor Doug Dineley, about that and he answered...no. You still gotta do that.

While vSphere 4 is an admirable addition to the VMware line, it does not represent the kind of paradigm shift that would warrant the description "cloud operating system." If you wanted to be really charitable, you could say that virtualization (or some other scheme that transforms physical machines into virtual compute resources) is fundamental to creating a "private cloud." And vSphere 4 certainly makes rolling out virtualization easier. But an OS? Nope.

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tomaddox 22-Apr-09 8:44am
Long after "cloud computing" has gone the way of "application service provider," SOA, SaaS, and a host of other buzzwords favored for fleeting moments by the tech press, VMware will still be there, hopefully continuing to produce high-quality software which radically alters and improves the lives of IT support and administrative personnel. VMware are opportunistically making use of the latest tag to ensure their product gets the most press. In two years, no one will care whether the tag fit at the time, and one could argue that no one cares now.
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