At is annual Analyst Day two weeks ago VMware updated several firms about the status of where the company is heading.
Despite the content presented that day are under non-disclosure agreements Carl Greiner, Senior Analyst at Ovum, revealed a couple of critical informations.
The first news is that the company is developing on almost every virtualization market segment: provisioning, host profiles, change, orchestration, operations, planning, capacity/performance management and charge-back.
VMware never approached some of these areas before and its upcoming (and yet expected) entrance will complicate the life of some of its current partners.
The second and most important news is that the company is working to attach the virtual data center policies to the virtual machine rather than to the physical host.
Talking about service and security capabilities, any time a VM is moved from one physical host to another by VMotion the underlying optimization or security layout is broken, hindering the creation of a truly dynamic data center.
Few companies (including VMware itself) started to address this challenge today, creating technology wrappers that encapsulate the VM and follow it on deployment, but so far there’s a just a limited attempt to provide security control through them.
To be able to define and embed the SLA/encryption, high availability, etc. policies for each VM is a completely different story.