VMware vCloud Service Director to be announced at VMworld 2010

TechTarget recently published an article about the involuntary information leak on VMware’s corporate website, revealing the roadmap for the upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) that virtualization.info extensively described in January.

Apparently, vCloud Service Director (vCSD), which is in private beta right now, will be formally announced at the end of August, during the VMworld 2010 conference.

Much more interesting is the fact that vCSD will leverage the jclouds Java library to access 3rd parties public clouds and mesh them with vSphere-based on-premises private clouds, creating what the industry now calls a hybrid cloud.

jclouds 1.0 is still in beta but it already supports a massive amount of public cloud infrastructures, including Amazon EC2 and other clouds based on Xen, vCloud Express implementations (for example the ones from BlueLock and Terremark).
Even storage clouds are supported, like Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos.

The lead developer of jclouds, Adrian Cole, was recruited by VMware one year ago as Cloud Ecosystem Architect.

vCSD will support three methods for resource management as TechTarget reports:

  • Allocation pools
    where users are given a ‘container’ of resources and allowed to create and use VMs anyway they like up to the limits of the CPU and storage they paid for
  • Reservation pools
    which give users a set of resources they can increase or decrease by themselves
  • Pay-per-VM
    for single-instance purchasing

Unfortunately, ss some early adopters interviewed have noted, the platform still lacks a robust security framework.
The issues mentioned in the article, multi-tenancy, multi-factor authentication, remote auditing, and regulation compliance are just a small part of the security capabilities that should be available in enterprise-class cloud platforms like vCSD.
There’s a fundamental difference in the way security should be enforced in the cloud that nor VMware neither its competitors seem capable to offer at the moment. More on this topic soon on virtualization.info