Last week’s Cloud Expo in New York City was eye-opening in many ways. For starters, we received some great feedback on our new vOperations Suite 3.5 which was announced at the show and is tailored for cloud and advanced virtualized environments with enhanced capacity planning, reporting, and performance visibility. Importantly, we had many insightful conversations with cloud providers, hosting firms and organizations deploying cutting-edge virtualized infrastructure implementations.  

One major theme pervaded amongst a high percentage of these conversations: hypervisor heterogeneity is here already. In fact, the few VMware-only shops we noted belonged to Global 2000-style firms, and many of the managers and administrators from these companies were already using or testing Hyper-V, Xen, KVM or AIX. VMware puts on a great show in VMworld that draws several thousand administrators and is unique in the market in terms of getting attention. However, from what we witnessed at Cloud Expo, other hypervisor contenders are starting to get more mindshare and most importantly, the tacit approval that they are “ready for prime time”…  these other players just haven’t yet received the limelight that events like VMworld provide. This leads to a key takeaway from the show: The virtualized world is much bigger than just VMware.

There were some other interesting observations as well from four days on the show floor. Such as:

• Proto-Hybrid Clouds Are Here Already - A massive amount of Expo-goers mentioned that they have already implemented a “hybrid” cloud (kind of), mostly deploying non-critical applications on larger public clouds such as Amazon’s EC2. Most have not yet gotten the infrastructure from the public and private data center space connected in any way. Though having an infrastructure component to do that job such as VMware’s vCloud Connector was seen by many as a nice-to-have, it was mentioned as not pressing enough to spend effort and money on at this point.
• Self-Service Portals are Becoming “Connective Tissue” For Many Areas of an Implementation – After seeing demos of self-service portals for clouds such as Abiquo, it was impressive to see the automation abilities that these provide for standard data center operations. From V2V functionality that can translate VMs between ESX, KVM, Xen and Hyper-V to tracking what’s going on over an interconnected web of data centers around the world in a single pane of glass, these products automate and execute multiple “routine” actions that could take a tremendous amount of time otherwise. Interestingly, despite last year’s VMworld fanfare over the product launch, there was little mention of VMware’s vCloud Director being used from Expo participants that were setting up clouds. By comparing VMware’s small booth near the back of the hall to Abiquo’s huge, centrally located and highly-trafficked “megaplex”, this represents another one of VMware’s 43 products that will require a significant investment of time and effort to establish mindshare while VMware tries to maintain an edge in a quickly-evolving hypervisor market.
• Across-the-Board Automation is Ready For Prime Time – A key word on nearly every Expo visitor’s lips was automation. As one administrator put it, “if a computer can undertake an action reasonably well most of the time, I’d rather deal with the few outliers that don’t work out than have to manually do everything”. This represents an interesting shift in administrator’s comfort levels and it will be interesting to probe how far the average administrator is willing to automate an environment.

On the topic of automation, stay tuned for some interesting developments for VKernel in the next few weeks. And, if you’re looking into deploying a cloud environment, or need to be able to simplify VM performance issue troubleshooting, VM reporting or capacity planning, check out vOPS. You can donwload a free 30-day trial here.