Concerning VMware’s vCloud Air: It's all about choice Cloud computing comes in many flavours, but the victor of the next few years will be the company that successfully sells its vision of the "hybrid cloud". If public cloud computing is putting your workloads in someone else's datacenter and private cloud computing is running them in your own, hybrid cloud computing is supposed to …
"I want one management interface ... that allows me to manage and maintain my entire infrastructure. Public cloud, private cloud … it shouldn't matter."
I'd buy that, yes. And I agree the on-premise kit is likely to be more than legacy for the foreseeable future. As a vision what you outline is one of the more coherent approaches.
I do wonder what you've been popping though, Trevor. Did you pause for breath once in that article? I feel exhausted for you.
Yes Trevor :-)
VMware have really got something here. Choice is key, and minimum disruption to local premis is a winner. Place your VM workloads in the cloud piece for DR and be able to manage them normally without losing control.
MS will preach they have this with Azure, but with total lock-in !!! - oh dear.
It all sounds really appealing and I'd love to give it a try, but the minimum buy-in just to test a couple of VMs is $1,000/mo., and that's for a very small Virtual Private Cloud offering. If I want dedicated, and I do if I have any hope of pleasing the auditors, then multiply that by 9x.
I just took a quick look and to replace my existing infrastructure with vCloud Air I'd need at least 2x Dedicated Cloud instances - nearly $220,000 per year, NOT including backups. My current costs including multiple backups and a fully replicated environment in two DCs are 1/3 what it would cost me in Air. I just don't see how Air makes financial sense when you really start comparing costs.
Amen to giving up building crap and spending time solving business problems instead, but who can afford it?
VCAC is a pain in the ASCII...but it's still easier than System Center anything. I look at VCAC the same way I look at social democracy as a means of political and economic organisation: it's shite, but it's far less shite than any of the alternatives on offer.
As for the "unreasonable price"...I expect that to come down. VMware is competing against itself in that there are service providers around the world standing up VMware clouds...and good cloudstack stuff on the horizon that I can't discuss (NDAs) that basically let you do what vCHS can do, but with your VMs going local VMware --> Openstack cloud -->local VMware.
Right now, VMware is getting their legs, but they've got what is probably the easiest to use and best option on the market. Competition will force the price down. I'm not convinced that competition can make other vendors create an easier to use product.
I am convinced that the VCAC guys and the Pivotal guys will get together to make orchestration stuff for VMware that is easier to use.
For now - and for the forseeable future - VMware is the best option on the table. I eagerly await a new player with innovations in ease of use that will force VMware to double-time the end-user portion of the equation. Maybe next cycle...
No problem Jim, vmotion works in vCloud Air. No downtime for maintenance.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vchs/vCloud-Hybrid-Service-Tech-FAQ.pdf
As far as costs to get started, you have to take into consideration the TCO "Total Cost of Ownership" of the private cloud and compare this to vCloud Air, including bandwidth costs. VMWARE is also now providing per hour costs http://vcloud.vmware.com/service-offering/pricing/pricing-calculator/ which may make it more palatable for a trial.
Regarding the costs, as well as the TCO considerations, it is probably a mistake to base your cost assumptions on a full replication of the sizing of your on premises IT infrastructure to vCloud Air. vCloud Air is cloud, so you size to what you use whereas an on premises environment is typically heavily under-utilised and has to size to peak capacities. As an example I've seen reductions of up to 70% of infrastructure sizing when moved to vCloud Air because of it's unique capabilities described in the article.
With cloud you right size the base line knowing you can scale up or down to meet demands.
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