As VMware rolls forward towards its annual ultimate event – VMworld 2012, powerful themes are starting to emerge.  VMware CTO and Senior VP of R&D Steve Herrod spoke out on his blog today on open source and the role of software in the datacenter.  Touching back on VMware’s Cloud Foundry investment, PaaS strategy, Nicira’s software defined networking capabilities, and on to the DynamicOps self-service and automated provisioning features, the construct formulates this vision of this software-defined infrastructure.

Within “pools of infrastructure” the suite of VMware solutions meets needs in heterogeneous environments, including such things as physical infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, Open Stack, and cloud stack elements.   It is clear the commitment to an API-focused strategy is critical to VMware’s datacenter products.  Herrod underscores this commitment in the following:

Code speaks far more than words, and you’ll see our commitment to this strategy in the contributions you’ll continue to see from VMware. These contributions will be in the abovementioned technologies, but you’ll see investments in other areas as well. We recognize that customers are asking for better integration, between the new cloud distributions and VMware’s enterprise products.  Developers who want to work with us should get in touch to get more closely involved.

Herrod continues with the statement that just as the benefits of virtualization has provided to computing, that same level of value is being brought to the datacenter with this software-defined construct and the continued commitment to keeping it open.  We should hear more from Steve Herrod on theCube at VMworld 2012.  Steve is a veteran panelist on theCube and has spoken extensively on the nature of a datacenter operating system as in this discussion from NODE Summit 2012 featuring Herrod and John Furrier.