Q&A: VMware talks up cloud interoperability

VMware's Dan Chu

VMware has put some flesh onto the bones of its plans for cloud computing at the VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes this week.

The company's vision includes the ability for VMware customers to turn their datacentres into internal clouds focused on delivering services as required, and to enable them to buy extra capacity from cloud service providers whenever necessary.

Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products at VMware, has overall responsibility for the company's vCloud initiative. He explained that, after listening to customers, the company is not only enabling the enterprise cloud, but delivering what it terms the "private cloud" formed from the combination of a customer's own resources and that of any third-party cloud it is utilising.

"We heard from customers that choice is key, and that they want the ability to run with already trusted service providers such as BT or Savvis or Terremark, but that they wanted the ability to be able to switch provider if necessary," he said.

Businesses also want to be able to move application workloads seamlessly between internal and external clouds. According to Chu, some VMware customers are already doing this in a rudimentary fashion, using external services to test and develop applications, then moving them back internally once the testing phase is over.

But to realise the vision of a broader market for cloud-based services, there need to be standards for interoperability, something that does not currently exist to any major degree.

"Standards are important. We see standards in terms of how applications and virtual machines are packaged to run across clouds, but also in how clouds are managed," said Chu.

Without such standards, cloud services are in danger of becoming dominated by a handful of proprietary "mega clouds" operated by companies such as Microsoft or Google, according to Chu, which will lock customers in and other vendors out.

He contrasted this with VMware's strategy, which he claimed is to be an enabler rather than an operator of cloud infrastructures.

On the packaging front, Chu said that VMware had been instrumental in driving the Open Virtualisation Format, a specification for packaging virtual machines that is not tied to any specific hypervisor or processor.

In terms of management standards, Chu said that this effort is at an early stage of development, but held up VMware's own vCloud API (application programming interface).

This is a "working, published API that's very lightweight" and allows service providers to at least begin working to some common standard, Chu explained.

"Today, all clouds are proprietary, as are the APIs behind them. We're now seeing interoperability emerging in terms of an API that can be used across clouds," he said.

When asked whether VMware was simply trying to spread its own API as widely as possible in order to make it the de facto standard for cloud services, Chu responded that "a big part of the solution is making the technology available, moving towards an open standard", and that the company "will try and move the state of the industry along with other cloud players".

"We see this happening in stages. The first thing is to get our API running across many providers, so that [customers] can get a broad range of support. We will also be aggressive in pushing our API into a generic standard," he said.

This includes rivals such as Microsoft. "We did a lot of the early work [on the Open Virtualisation Format], but we were able to pull in Microsoft and XenSource to support this, and we're already working with parties in the Distributed Management Task Force for cloud management. Over time, all major parties interested in cloud management will have to get along," said Chu.

Before the end of this year, VMware will "release a lot of functionality in vSphere and vCenter," according to Chu, but he added that there are already a lot of services coming to market on the existing VMware platform.

The other important audience is internal administrators, who will be able to reach out and manage cloud resources later this year using the vCenter vCloud plug-in for VWware's VI Client management console, which was announced at VMworld.

"VI Client then becomes a manager of cloud resources, one that is already used for managing internal resources in thousands of companies already," concluded Chu.