Roundup: VMworld Europe 2009

The Register's big-picture summary describes the Cannes agenda as "VMware's world takeover bid." The company's VSphere architecture includes "a set of interfaces looking downwards at the IT plumbing and another set looking at the applications. ... In general IT resources are treated as things to scale up or down as required operationally.The vSphere product will be able to trace every instruction executed on every server in the data centre, providing an extremely granular record for security purposes and also, eventually, for billing purposes as VMware will add billing hooks to vSphere."

Network World looks beyond the features to the broader context of VMware’s push for a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), a software layer that aggregates virtualized servers, storage and network resources into one big computing pool. "VMware started talking about the VDC-OS last September and still has not announced a release date, but the company is providing further details on its capabilities this week," Network World writes.

But not enough details for some users, who want to know when to expect vSphere and how much it will cost. "But VMware CEO Paul Maritz was not forthcoming at the 'VMware Unplugged' session at VMworld Europe on Wednesday," reports TechTarget.

Virtualization.info looks at the Day 2 highlights, live-blogging the keynote from CTO Stephen Herrod, who discussed VCloud extension. "A customer using vSphere 4.0 can install the plug-in, log on the cloud service provider he has a contract with and simply drag his production virtual machine inside the cloud infrastructure that appears within the vCenter GUI," writes Alessandro Perilli. "The VM will be automatically migrated inside the cloud without further intervention." 

Reuven Cohen at Elastic Vapor drills down into the new cloud capabilities. " VMware is saying that its various management tools will only work on top of the VMware hypervisor," he writes. "In other words, physical servers and servers virtualised by Microsoft, Citrix or any other vendor will not be compatible with the Vcloud initiative. Summarized, we're interoperable as long as it's VMWare." 

While it is introducing many new features of its software, VMware says it isn't going to get into the cloud hosting business. That's according to TechTarget, which had suggested in earlier reports that VMware's lease of space in a huge Sabey Corp. data center in Quincy, Wash. meant that the company would offer hosting services. The company says the facility will be used for data center R&D .