With the launch of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service you now have three options available when discussing VMware public cloud options:
- VMware vCloud Powered – Available through a lot of different partners throughout the world.
- VMware vCloud Datacenter – Offered by a few big datacenter providers.
- VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – VMware’s own vCloud solution.
This article compares these three types of vCloud cloud offerings and also updates you on some changes on VMware’s vCloud portal.
VMware vCloud Powered
A VMware vCloud Powered offering is build on vSphere, vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security. vCloud Powered is optimized for a range of different use cases: seasonal projects, transient workloads, and test/development. The consumption model for the cloud services depends on the cloud provider you’re doing business with.
vCloud Powered providers are most of the local companies with local presence. For The Netherlands e.g. KPN, Greencloud and Proserve have vCloud Powered datacenters available. Services are priced by the provider.
VMware vCloud Datacenter
VMware vCloud Datacenter service providers deliver globally consistent enterprise-class cloud computing infrastructure services. For a cloud service to be classified as enterprise-class, it must meet the enterprise requirements for security, compatibility, and agility, e.g:
- Guaranteed Performance and Uptime: Scale IT resources with guaranteed performance and uptime meeting SLAs of 99.9% or higher.
- Trust: Get auditable security and compliance through SAS 70 Type II or ISO27001 compliant clouds.
- Extend Your Datacenter: Gain the freedom to move workloads from your virtualized datacenter to a secure public cloud, with the flexibility to transfer them back and forth as needed. Don’t forget licensing requirements I wrote about earlier.
VMware partners with global service providers are certified to deliver vCloud Datacenter Services. At this moment vCloud Datacenter providers are: AT&T, Blue Lock, Colt, CSC, Dell, Optus Elevate, OVH.COM, Singtel, SoftBank and T-Systems. Blue Lock, Colt and T-Systems offer a free test-drive, which allows you to test their service.
The vCloud Datacenter offering is build on VMware vSphere, vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security.
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service
VMware’s own offering is the vCloud Hybrid Service, not yet available at this time (June 2013) but you can sign-up for early access. VMware is offering a Dedicated Cloud option and a Virtual Private Cloud option. I am not so happy with the naming: the Virtual Private Cloud option is running on a shared platform and thus more of a public cloud than a private cloud. Dedicated cloud is physically separated and running on dedicated hardware.
According to the technical FAQ (available here) the vCloud Hybrid Service uses vCloud Director with a customized UI. Currently VMware’s vCloud Hyrbid Service is running in a Las Vegas based datacenter, and has only US presence. In the future VMware will build new datacenters across the world.
VMware Cloud Connector
All VMware vCloud IAAS solution is compatible with VMware Cloud Connector. With VMware Cloud Connector you can connect your virtual infrastructure to a private or public cloud. More information on vCloud Connector is available is available here:
- VMware vCloud Connector: An introduction – Connect vSphere to your vCloud Director based IAAS Cloud!
- And also read: Software Licensing – A limiting factor on cloud workload mobility?
Update on VMware vCloud portal
On vcloud.vmware.com there’s an overview of all the vCloud Service Partners available. It’s now possible to select partners per country and not only per region as it used to be. Be careful, some of the countries appear a couple of time in the list. For example The Netherlands is known as “The Netherlands”, “Netherlands” and “NL”, with different vCloud partners linked to these “different” countries.
