The real story behind VMworld 2010

Last week, I had the opportunity to camp out at VMware’s VMworld 2010 conference in San Francisco. The odd amalgamation of 17,000-plus geeks and suits from around the globe — fleetingly united by the same free conference backpack — was a sight to see.

Both VMware and its unusually wide community of partners (and some competitors) made good use of the face time with potential and continuing customers. Through all of the marketing din and underneath the press releases, a few trends stood out, along with a strong sense that virtualization was reaching a new level of maturity.

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The cloud is where it’s at

Nearly every vendor present made a tremendous effort to show exactly how “ready for the cloud” it was. That ran the gamut from VMware’s unveiling of its vCloud Director — which supports the construction of private clouds — to an assortment of cloud-related announcements from partners. No matter which booth you visited, “cloud” was the first word off the marketing droid’s tongue.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive. This is actually a really, really big deal. I’ve been critical of the hype surrounding the cloud, but what I saw at VMworld was a sea change from what I’ve seen previously. Some very large companies (VMware, but many others as well) are pinning massive amounts of capital — and indeed, their futures — on both the concepts of public and private clouds becoming not just an option, but the de facto way of conducting IT operations.

Interestingly, some less cloud-focused companies are making defensive moves to prepare for VMware’s and others’ success. A good example is HP’s announcement of its HP CloudStart, which can be described as a “private cloud in a box.” This offering is built on a combination of HP’s BladeSystem Matrix, StorageWorks, and Cloud Service Automation products (essentially: c-Class blade chassis, EVA SAN, and a mountain of automation, provisioning, and monitoring software). CloudStart allows a customer to build a fully functional private cloud within 30 days of signing on the dotted line. It’s a very cool product, but take a step back and imagine why HP might be offering CloudStart at this particular time.

HP’s party line is that CloudStart is a great way for CIOs to fight “shadow IT,” where business units in large enterprises go rogue and buy servers and software outside of the IT organization’s purview. My favorite example of this was a discussion I had several years ago at an InfoWorld event with a few admins from a very large financial institution, who were preparing for a large push toward virtualization. When they conducted an organization-wide capacity analysis, they realized that instead of 3,000 servers — the rough number they thought they had — their total came to more than 7,000 servers. In other words, 57 percent of their servers had been purchased without IT oversight! Ouch.

Today, the rogue threat goes beyond physical servers to public cloud offerings. Imagine the surprise of the CIO when he or she learns that a mission-critical application isn’t on an under-the-radar server sitting on someone’s desk, but is now hosted “somewhere” in the cloud. CloudStart is designed to put a stop to that by offering an IT-sanctioned private cloud in which business units can quickly and easily deploy their applications with minimal lead time and automated chargeback.

But there’s another reason as well: A big chunk of HP’s bread and butter comes from server and storage sales. If everyone goes off willy-nilly to the public cloud, that might not be good for the CIO, but it could be a lot worse for HP. No doubt some cloud computing providers use high-end hardware from HP, but a much larger percentage don’t (see Google or Amazon with their sea of white boxes).

The very public wrangling between HP and Dell over cloud-optimized storage provider 3Par only serves to underline this point. These companies have had their wheelbarrows under the cash spigot of traditional server and storage sales for years. Now the spigot is moving — and they’re tripping over themselves to stay underneath it.

VMware continues to eat its young

Back in the days when VMware just made a hypervisor, there was tremendous potential for third-party software companies to create offerings that complemented VMware’s products. Wisely, VMware has been good about offering open APIs in its products to foster growth in its solution channel.

Of course, VMware has also quietly observed the success of these efforts and released similar functionality in its own products. VMware vCenter? VMware Site Recovery Manager? VMware vDR? VMware View? All of these are VMware products (or features) that once required third-party software. The satellite companies mustn’t feel that great about it. It’s sort of like discovering that your plumber has been taking your wife out to dinner on Thursdays.

VMware’s foray into cloud automation with vCloud Director is more of the same — a large number of small VMware partners in this space will now be competing with VMware’s products. Some have more mature products than VMware, but few can vie with VMware’s development capital and marketing reach. And as VMware’s features and product lines continue to cannibalize its partner offerings, customers will be increasingly leery about investing in third-party products.

Complexity on top of complexity

If you want to boil down what VMware does in one word, it’s “abstraction.” The hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the operating system, allowing it to operate in the same way no matter what hardware it’s on. VMware vCenter abstracts the management of individual hypervisors so that you see the entire data center as a single pool of resources. vCloud Director abstracts the management of individual hardware-based data centers so that it’s no longer particularly important where your applications are running. These abstractions are all excellent — they give IT a huge degree of flexibility and dexterity.

But they also introduce complexity. Each of these layers (and many others like them when you take offerings like site failover and virtual desktops into account) add another chunk of critical software infrastructure that must be maintained and troubleshot. Anyone imagining that private clouds might lead to a huge reduction in demand for IT talent is mistaken. Building these clouds and making them work the way they must in order to deliver on their promise will require a ton of effort.

There’s no business like show business

This is the fifth VMworld I’ve attended and it has been the most entertaining by far. At previous VMworlds, VMware and its partners seemed to announce their products in a vacuum; this time, they all spoke the same language and stayed on message. VMware has made the transition from simply holding a big market share to being a true industry leader. Over the next five years, as VMware’s competitors catch up, it will be interesting to see whether the company can stay balanced on the pedestal it has erected for itself.

This article, “The real story behind VMworld 2010,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.