Well VMworld is over for another year. The much anticipated event for many high tech fans means networking, new technology and of course parties. That said, we saw some interesting news come from VMworld this week and here’s a short recap and my thoughts.
1) Microsoft announces they offer a private cloud that is 4 times cheaper than VMware, but more importantly they roll out some hilarious marketing that smacks VMware while they recover from the recent pricing snafu.
2) Dell announces they will offer a public cloud leveraging vCloud Director, only weeks after announcing they will make OpenStack commercially available. Makes you wonder why they would choose vCloud for their public offering, but encourage an open source stack for everyone else to figure out?
3) Eucalyptus announces High Availability in version 3.0 and the confirmation that they aren’t dying. Mr. Micko’s, glad to see that you’re still in the game. By the way, in case you missed it, Abiquo announced High Availability in version 1.8 a few months ago.
4) Citrix decides to give Cloud.com away for free via Open Source, or loss leader or proliferation strategy, what ever you want to call it. Will this be their winning hand against VMware for cloud penetration or will it end up like their other open source offering? Oddly, this report sites that while it’s claiming open source, the price is still $995 per 2-core host- but doesn’t state if that’s for support or what you’re getting for that price.
5) Lastly, VMware announced a ton of stuff, but the interesting part was vCloud Global Connect, which seems to be a partnership “hug” around working with a few providers looking for some airtime from VMware. I agree with Gartner’s Lydia Leong on this one. I’m not sure VMware can execute on this promise and if they did, do people really want this?
We also saw lots of nice stories that summarize what’s happening and who to see at VMworld- so if you’re looking at private cloud solutions, this short list from The VirtualizationPractice might make it easy to create your own short list when you get back to work. Or if you want more detail, this report from Forrester gets to the heart of it all.
We can all take a breather now and wait for the next cloud wave in November, when Cloud Computing Expo hits the Bay Area. See ya there.
