VMware vCloud Hybrid Service Bridges Gap

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VMware is the company that has transformed modern data centers and enterprises from being tethered to hardware to running virtualized workloads.

Now VMware is looking to extends its mastery of the on-premise IT landscape with the new vCloud Hybrid service.

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“The vCloud Hybrid Service is about bridging the gap between lines of business and IT needs in a unique and powerul way,” Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware said in a media launch event.

The promise of the vCloud Hybrid Service is to enable VMware’s existing 500,000 customers to seamlessly migrate and integrate with the public cloud when needed. Gelsinger referred to the new service as being a tool for business agility.

“Any application, any place, any cloud without any changes,” Gelsinger said. “This to us is the magic that made virtualization real in the first place, the fact that I can take an OS or application, wrap it in VMware wrapper and all of a sudden I couldn’t tell what server it was running on any longer.”

The promise of the vCloud Hybrid Service is now that the application can be delivered from any data center seamlessly, in the same way that virtual applications have long been able to run on any server inside one data center with VMware.

Bill Fathers, SVP and GM for the vCloud Hybrid Service at VMware, noted that today there are over 3,700 applications that are already certified on the VMware platform, that will work on vCloud Hybrid service without any changes.

While existing apps can migrate to the cloud, Fathers also sees the new service as a platform for new applications as well. New applications can exist entirely in the vCloud Hybrid Service or in a truly hybrid mode, where part of the app is in the public cloud and part resides on premise for back-end data.

Management

A key promise of the new service is manageability.

On-premise VMware customers today are familiar with the vCenter tool for virtual machine management. With the Hybrid Cloud Services, vCenter will now be enabled to manage virtual machines whether they exist on-premise or in the Hybrid Cloud Services.

Additionally the service is being enabled for the open source Puppet orchestration system, enabling enterprises to deploy apps across both public and private clouds.

Services

Initially VMware is providing the Hybrid Services by way of two service instances. There is a vCloud Hybrid Service Dedicated Cloud that provides reserved compute resource and is priced starting at $0.13/hour.

The other instance is the vCloud Hybrid Service Virtual Private Cloud, which provide a multi-tenant model for resource and is priced starting at $0.045/hour.

The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is currently in Early Access with General Availability in the US set for the third quarter of 2013.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.