VMware’s Big Plans Lead to Major Hypervisor Launch
On July 12, virtualization giant VMware is expected to announce a couple of major hypervisor launches. More about that later, but until then, though, the company is putting its focus on Cloud Foundry among other things. The PaaS offering is VMware’s first serious open-source initiative, built by former Google engineers Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky. They were hired personally by company head Paul Maritz, who recently said at the GigaOm Structure conference that the servers per admin ratio should get closer to that of Google – about one per every 1,000 physical servers. In comparison, VMware’s ratio is closer to one admin per 20 to 50 machines.
The company is looking to greatly reduce that number both for itself and its customers:
“[Google’s ratio] is really what has to happen,” Maritz said. “You talk about the cloud. We’re got to get to the point where enterprises, whether they’re handling their infrastructure internally or externally, are reaching similar levels of efficiency.”
The open-source cloud is a major driver of innovation for the entire industry, and one of the biggest names that stand out amongst the crowd these days is Hadoop. The data management platform has its fair share of competition nevertheless, including HPCC Systems. The latter partnered up with analytics firm LexisNexis to try and compete for market share by growing the amount of data customers can process at once.
Cloud Foundry is a major area of focus for VMware, but it is never going to be a serious open-source company unless it would open vSphere, says Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of Red Hat’s cloud computing unit. That will indeed not be the case, especially since the company is expected to debut vSphere 5.0 in a San Francisco event in will hold on July 12.
According to rumors the new stack will no longer have an ESX Server 5.0 hypervisor, considering it’s unnecessary with functions such as the vCenter management console. The extracted ESXi hypervisor however will be getting an update. ESXi 4.1 be expanded to be able to span up to 160 x64 processor cores and host a maximum of 512 VMs on a single physician server with the latest version. A single virtual machine will be able to grow as large as 32 cores.
In other “infrastructure 2.0” news, SSD storage company SolidFire launched a line-up of new cloud-purposed offerings today aimed to further accelerate performance and lower costs. It’s an example of another startup hoping to make its mark by reworking cloud architecture, solving one problem at a time.
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