vCloud vs. vSphere: What’s the difference anyway?

NetCraftsmen®

You’ve been building your vSphere environment for several years now. After a few upgrades, both hardware and software, you’ve finally developed a robust, flexible platform for your infrastructure. vCenter Server shows only the occasional alert, and your workloads are outperforming the bare metal shells from which they were rescued via P2V.

And now VMware wants you to upgrade to vCloud Suite? And for free?

If you’re like me, you’re still not convinced that vCloud is right for you yet. Maybe you’re not even sure what vCloud Suite is!

In a nutshell, vCloud Suite is a complete automation system for public and private clouds that relies on vSphere as its infrastructure. Many components comprise vCloud Suite; most notably, vCloud Director. To help visualize all of these parts, Alan Renouf (a VMware employee who writes the most amazing scripts) unveiled a great vCloud Suite poster. Hope you’ve got a plotter.

IMHO, this is VMware’s long-term vision for the data center: shift the focus from the infrastructure to the applications. Automate and optimize. Deploy infrastructure dynamically to meet application demands.

Not convinced? Browse on over to vmware.com. Look what offering gets top billing; virtualization is SECOND!

I’ll be learning more about vCloud Suite and sharing as I go. If you’ve got any burning questions, use the comments or contact me via email.

mike

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