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benverghese
Contributor
Contributor

It’s getting cloudy out there. Did you pack your management umbrella?

Hello, my name is Ben Verghese and I am the Chief Mgmt Architect at Vmware. Been here over ten years and seen virtualization go from an interesting technology applied to x86 (a classically non-virtualizable architecture) to the basis for a complete rethink of how IT is done,; infrastructure to applications.

Management is a core part of the journey from legacy physical infrastructure to fully virtualized datacenters to eventual Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud models. A streamlined management model in this final stage is essential to realize the full Opex savings to go along with the Capex savings seen with the advent of virtualization in the datacenter.

This is an exciting time to be thinking of how mgmt will evolve with and drive the movement to the cloud model. I am privileged to be part of this story and working with the CTO’s office at VMware to help drive this story along with our customers and partners.

We see the changes in Infrastructure and Applications needing a significantly new approach to mgmt of IT, different from what is currently driving Enterprise IT. This represents a challenge and a huge opportunity.

Traditional View of Application/Infrastructure Mgmt

10501_10501.png

Cloud-based model for Production and Consumption of Infrastructure

10502_10502.png

A few of the important drivers of change for Cloud Services Management are:

  • Massive standardization and high-level abstraction; unified & simplified mgmt

  • Dynamic relationships across all layers of the application & infrastructure stack

  • Change is automated & frequent

  • Supports legacy & new apps across both private and public clouds

  • Will evolve to require vendor mgmt, financial mgmt (e.g. chargeback)

In the coming weeks, I will be elaborating on these trends and how we see management changing to respond to these various drivers. I hope to make this an ongoing discussion and am very interested in the different perspectives across the industry as we evolve our shared story around IT management.

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thickclouds
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ben -

Thanks for taking the time to share your view of how virtualization management is evolving and how the adoption of cloud computing further shapes its' future. It is my hope that the VMware management suite will move more toward a fully integrated platform rather than independent products. One can hope right...

My organization is starting to take advantage of vCenter Orchestrator and is very excited about it's potential to fully automate manual tasks performed today. I hope that VMware will continue to invest in vCO and build the necessary integration to truly enable PaaS/IaaS.

Thanks again for taking the time. I look forward to your next post.

Charlie Gautreaux

vExpert

http://www.thickclouds.com

Charlie Gautreaux vExpert http://www.thickclouds.com
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benverghese
Contributor
Contributor

Charlie,

Thanks for your comment. We are working hard to make vCenter a more extensible platform and to evolve our products into a management suite as you suggest. You should start to see the results of that in the next releases of vSphere. We would look to folks like you to keep us honest and let us know where we are doing things right or wrong.

Specifically about vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), this is definitely an area that we are investing in. It has taken a bit for the product to evolve from the startup acquisition (Dunes) to be enterprise ready. I do believe that it has reached that level in scalability and quality. You will see us taking bigger strides with vCO in terms of ease of use, integration and content in the form of plugins for other parts of our product line and workflows. While infrastructure changes to vCO will be timed to our bigger releases, we expect to get into a more agile mode for more frequent delivery of content.

Also would strongly encourage the ecosystem to build workflows and plugins to vCO because it is a great way to integrate across vendor and VMware products for flexible automation of IT infrastructure and App production. We are definitely investing in vCO.

ben

p.s. Thanks also for your good work with the VMware Users Group

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thickclouds
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ben -

Thanks for the good noes about vCO and look forward to seeing this suite evolve. I agree on all points and again appreciate your openness to feedback and discussion in the community forums.

Thanks again,

Charlie

Charlie Gautreaux

vExpert

http://www.thickclouds.com

Charlie Gautreaux vExpert http://www.thickclouds.com
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