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August 29, 2011

Server virtualization vendor VMware has officially opened its annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas today, and the event has given way to a whole slew of new products designed to help managing virtual machine technology for companies.

VMware has also lined up several new partnerships to help enterprises find, connect and manage its cloud services.

VMware is actually coming into the conference after a very turbulent summer, when a new licensing policy set off a whirlpool of protests from customers, leading the company to review and change its decision in the following days.

VMware has also had to deal with mounting pressure from Microsoft, the company that trails VMware significantly but continues to launch public relations attacks at VMware in an effort to lure customers-- something that the hosting industry has been adopting quite a bit in the last few months.

As the conference opens this morning, VMware is launching its new vFabric Data Director, a product designed to give IT managers better control over the variety of databases in their information systems.

The new product offers policy-based automation to manage those diverse databases. And vFabric Data Director allows for self-service provisioning of databases as well for application developers in order that they can quickly choose the database service they need to create new applications.

The first database supported on vFabric Data Director is VMware vFabric Postgres, a new offering from the virtualization vendor that is based on and fully compatible with PostgreSQL, the open source object-relational database management system.

VMware also announced that database vendors Sybase and Greenplum will also support Data Director, which will be available for download in the third quarter of this year, for $600 per managed virtual server.

Separately, VMware also introduced some new programs and technology to help enterprise customers find and manage their cloud services. One of the new programs is Global Connect, a program that stitches together offerings from service providers from across the globe: Bluelock in North America, Colt in Europe, SingTel in the Asia Pacific region, and Softbank in Japan.

The virtualization service from those partners lets multinational companies operate their clouds as across those regions as though they were delivered in a single, virtual cloud.

David McJannet, VMware's director of Cloud & Application Services, said that the idea is to reduce "database sprawl," the spread of under-managed and potentially insecure databases throughout corporations. The company is hoping to solve the problem of developers by fishing around for databases to create applications rather than waiting for IT departments to provision one for them.

Data Director is designed gives those developers quick access to the tools they need, and when they need them.

"It's all about enabling an organization to offer databases as a service internally," McJannet added.

VMware also debuted a new subweb site: vcloud.vmware.com where companies can find vCloud service providers and test drive their services. Right now, VMware lists forty-eight partners globally in alphabetical order. But Mathew Lodge, senior director of Cloud Services at VMware said that the listings will ultimately include reviews and recommendations to guide enterprise clients.

"It was quite difficult to find a good provider," Lodge said. It's unclear if VMware Chief Executive Paul Maritz will address the company's new licensing plan. When VMware unveiled the plan in July as it launched its vSphere 5 platform, customers lit up blogs and Twitter, complaining about increased costs.

Within a few weeks, VMware revised its licensing policy in the face of that dissatisfaction.

VMware rival Microsoft, which is trying to chip away at the massive lead of the virtualization giant, seized the opportunity to pitch its own technology. A few weeks ago, Jeff Woolsey of Microsoft's Windows Server & Cloud group posted a blog on the price revision on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog.

He came to the conclusion that, to no surprise, VMware was still hiking its prices-- something that irritated more than one in the IT industry and in the Linux community.

Microsoft plans to continue the debate during VMworld. As the conference begins, Microsoft is launching an ad campaign featuring a plucky video that will run on IT news sites, poking fun at what Microsoft suggests is VMware's out-of-date pricing policy.

The ad features a sales executive, dressed in flashy 1970s garb and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache, trying to sell virtualization technology from a company called "VMlimited" from the back of his tricked out van. At one point, a customer asks if the price he's offering is based on unlimited use.

"Absolutely. In fact, the more you use, the more you pay," the salesman says to the bewildered customer.

Microsoft's Public Relations Chief Frank Shaw, who publicly challenged Google's chief legal officer earlier this month in a dispute over patent licensing, blogged that Microsoft will continue to aggressively challenge rivals.

"You can expect to see us continue to find new ways to tell our story, on our own and against our competitors, especially where there is a gap between perception and facts, using ads, tweets, video, infographics, and, we hope, more than a dash of humor," Shaw wrote.

In other Linux news

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that its new version of the GPL (General Public Licence) removes the problems affecting version 2, but not everyone in the Linux community is convinced that the issue even exists in the first place. Others disagree.

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The FSF says that Linux application developers and mobile app devs need to move quickly to GPLv3 if they're to avoid Android (and similar Linux-based platforms) getting entangled in complex and lengthy legal battles, despite the fact that many are claiming that such legal issues are no more than small road blocks in the eyes of publicity-hungry bloggers.

At issue here is the clause in version two of the GPL which states that anyone breaching the restrictions irrevocably surrenders their rights under the licence.

And as just about every Android licensee has failed at some point to provide source code or written notice of source code provision, then the argument goes they are all in breach of the GPLv2 and thus open to copyright suits from every Linux developer imaginable.

This was highlighted by IP attorney Edward Naughton, expounded by Florian Mueller. All the attention has prompted the FSF to explain that its latest licence repairs all issues, and on a permanent basis.

Version three of the GPL allows the rights to be reinstated when compliance is re-established so a company failing to distribute source code could remove the threat of suit by releasing the code, so the FSF has released a statement asking Linux application developers and system integrators to get into GPLv3 before it is too late.

"We urge all mobile app developers who are releasing projects under GPLv2 to upgrade to GPLv3," says the statement, naming Android as the platform at risk. "Companies that sell products that use Android can help out by encouraging the developers of Linux to make the switch to GPLv3," says the FSF.

However, despite the wording of the GPLv2, which rescinds licences for violations, it still isn't clear whether it does, and equally important, whether any of the developers involved in Linux have the money which would be needed to make the case or inclination to start suing people for illegally using their code.

On average, Linux developers are generally laid back for the most part, unlikely to start raising capital to fund what would be a complex and costly legal case, but the FSF argues that it is the fear of being sued that prevents companies from using GPL code-- a fear which may have little basis.

"This is just one of multiple reasons why GPLv3 is better than GPLv2", argues the FSF. "This change has already given some companies the reassurance they need to start distributing GPL-covered software, and we expect to see more of that in the near future."

The FSF shouldn't be using fear of a non-existent threat to promote its new licence, but anything that puts companies off the free alternatives is an issue for sure. The threat might never be realized, but with the GPLv3 it definitely won't be.

In other Linux news

It's now official-- Ubuntu 11.10 will ship with both the client and server components of Cloud Foundry, the "platform cloud" VMware open sourced in late April. The project actually started in January and is on schedule.

Yesterday, VMware and Ubuntu's Canonical both announced that the next version of the Linux distribution due for official release in October 2011 will include Cloud Foundry packages built by a team of Canonical engineers.

Canonical claims that about 12 million active Ubuntu desktop users, and VMware boasts that with the Cloud Foundry client on the imminent Oneiric Ocelot, these millions will be only a few commands away from deploying an application on its existing Cloud Foundry service.

With the Cloud Foundry server deployment tools bundled as well, Ubuntu users will have the ready option of building their own cloud based on the platform.

Ubuntu is already the core OS behind VMware's service. Akin to Microsoft's Azure or Google's App Engine, Cloud Foundry is an online service for building, deploying, and readily scaling applications. But unlike Microsoft or Google, VMware has released the code behind the service, hoping to spawn an army of compatible services.

Still tagged as an initial beta version, the Cloud platform lets you build applications with Java, Ruby on Rails, the Ruby framework Sinatra, and Node.js, the darling of today's Silicon Valley development world.

VMware's Cloud Foundry service is offered alongside various similar services, providing online access to the MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis databases as well as the RabbitMQ open source messaging system. VMware's SpringSource arm acquired Rabbit Technologies in April of 2010.

Yesterday, VMware also announced Cloud Foundry partnerships with Dell, enStratus, and OpsCode, each meant to facilitate the deployment of the Cloud Foundry platform on local servers.

Dell will release a version of its Crowbar software for installing and configuring Cloud Foundry onto bare-metal servers. enStratus has updated its cloud management tool to help the deployment of VMware's platform atop the eighteen "infrastructure clouds" it handles.

And OpsCode will publish the OpsCode Chef "recipes" – sysadmin scripts – that VMware built for deploying Cloud Foundry. These will also be rolled into the OpsCode service that lets you use the open source Chef platform over the Internet.

Core Ubuntu developer Dustin Kirkland offers instructions for using the Cloud Foundry VMC client package (ruby-vmc) and command line interface bundled with Oneiric Ocelot, and he provides a separate tutorial for the VCAP server.

Canonical has long offered software for building infrastructure clouds, services that provide readily scalable access to raw computing resources such as processing power and storage. It first embraced the Eucalyptus platform, then it dropped Eucalyptus for OpenStack. However, this is Ubuntu's first move into platform clouds, which operate at a higher level, hiding raw resources.

VMware has reinvented itself as an open source company-- at least that's what the company claims.

Source: VMware.

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