VMWare Unveils Products for Enterprise Integration

At VMworld 2008 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., this week, VMWare unveiled software products for cloud, storage, management and virtualization-aware networks. The series of interrelated products emphasize integration of VMWare across the enterprise for a variety of services.

VMWare says this year's show will host more than 14,000 attendees and 206 vendors.

Zero Downtime

The centerpiece of VMWare's push this week is its Virtual Data Center Operating System(VDC-OS). The system allows users to pool a variety of storage, server and network hardware resources into one aggregated cloud for use by the enterprise.

VMWare says VDC-OS is self-managing and self-healing, and dynamically allocates cloud resources where and when needed. It said VDC-OS seamlessly supports applications written for any operating system, including distributed applications that run in mixed environments. As part of the VDC-OS initiative, the vServices component delivers the appropriate level of security, fault tolerance, or quality of service for applications without additional hardware or software.

A high-availability component provides zero downtime and zero data loss and includes an automatic restart of virtual machines. Protection scales all the way up to a Site Recovery Manager that automates failover for an entire company in case of comprehensive disasters, but simple data protection using disk-based backup and recovery for all applications is also part of the OS.

vStorage and vNetwork

VMWare's new cloud capabilities can allocate applications to both on-site and off-site clouds, giving multisite enterprises a great deal of flexibility for application management and fault tolerance. New features include vCapacityIQ that constantly analyzes system capacity and plans accordingly, ConfigCentralControl that automatically rolls out policy-based configurations across the VMWare enterprise, and AppSpeed, which automatically monitors application performance and triggers remedial performance enhancements without intervention.

All the new services tie into the VDC-OS central management console. The VMWare announcement also indicated that management-console vendors such...