Virtualization is the onramp to cloud computing, and management and automation capabilities unleash the full value of this technological shift. We’ve been busier than ever on the management and automation front, releasing new versions of vCenter, vCloud, and vFabric last week. There are lots of great capabilities to discuss in all of these, but today I would like to focus on VMware’s newest management product: vFabric Application Director. VMware’s management and automation efforts are aimed at simplifying and standardizing the delivery of Infrastructure (with vCloud Director, vCenter and vCenter Operations) as well as End User Services (with Horizon), and we extended this mission and strategy further to address three tier web applications and middleware.
Almost everyone in IT that I meet with acknowledges the significant complexity of current application deployment and sees PaaS (Platform as a Service) as an excellent destination for all types of applications. As we help customers move to the cloud, they begin to rethink how their applications are built, deployed and managed. Application Director offers customers a new approach to provisioning and managing applications, and allows IT to modernize applications without requiring significant changes to the way they operate today.
Last Friday’s launch of vFabric Application Director was VMware’s first big step towards easing application deployment on vSphere platforms, catering to the rich set of middleware services provided through vFabric and fully extensible to any middleware stack. Key benefits include:
- Enabling hybrid cloud (private or public) deployments through rich application modeling abilities, abstracting model from deployment environments
- Collaborative model for dev and operations teams that is easy to use and highly flexible
- Offering both developer agility and IT control through standardization of middleware components
Application Director’s design paradigm lets IT leverage their investments in previous technologies and processes, and helps to simplify and accelerate the delivery of new applications.
Application Director produces blueprints of applications that later be provisioned on any vSphere cloud
The vFabric Application Director team wrote a great blog about Friday’s release. And if you’re looking for more detailed product information, you can check out the vFabric Application Director product page or watch a demo of the product.