VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘virtual appliance’

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has recently announced the public availability of the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta, a tool to create virtual appliances and distribute them in OVF format, and today’s VMTN Roundtable Podcast provided a lot of discussion about the possible scenarios for using this new version. I’m still struggling to get my mind around the potential of Studio 2.0, but I did come away from today’s podcast with a few ideas that make me think I have either blurred the functions of several existing products or I have suddenly realized there may be some great “outside the box” use case scenarios for this new VMware software.

Before continuing, it is most clear that VMware Studio’s designed intent is for ISVs and developers to package their applications as preconfigured, ready to import virtual appliances. Now with version 2.0 even multi tiered applications can be wrapped up as a vApp in vSphere and exported as an OVF containing several VMs and then imported by any VMware virtualization host (free, hosted, or bare metal). If you are not already familiar with VMware Studio check out the Studio 2.0 Beta Overview web page for a complete listing of features, but the primary topic of interest (to me and the others on today’s podcast) seems to be centered around how enterprises can leverage VMware Studio, vApps, and OVF templates.

This is where the lines get blurry to me, and I’ll outline potential Studio / OVF usage that may be “outside of the box” from the VMware software’s intended purpose. Or is it? You tell me. Read the rest of this entry »