A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blogpost on Hypervisors and the features discussions and if these discussions about the hypervisor itself would become obsolete, although I didn’t get the discussion on my blogpost that I expected VMware did confirm my thoughts by buying DynamicsOps and Nicira.
DynamicsOps
As most people that I’ve spoken to can confirm I’m a firm believer of orchestration and automation in every way of delivering IT infrastructure, when looking at DynamicOps you’ll see they have a focus on just those two things trough different platforms:
- PRIVATE CLOUD ENABLEMENT
- VIRTUAL DESKTOP CLOUD
- PUBLIC CLOUD GATEWAY
- CLOUD AS A PLATFORM
As stated on their website:
DynamicOps Operations Virtualization technology helps you create a secure, self-service cloud by combining automation, orchestration and management across disparate management systems with user-aware, IT-controlled governance. It works by:
- Separating operational resources into different logical views based upon user context.
- Applying rules that govern the interaction between user request and multiple automation, orchestration and management platforms so that you maintain compliance with corporate policy.
- Applying management to the layer below without the layer above knowing how or why—keeping everything clean and simple.
- Protecting the underlying system from indiscriminate change so that nothing inadvertently breaks down or causes rippling-effect alternations.
- Simplifying interaction without requiring consumer input or knowledge.
With DynamicOps Operations Virtualization, you eliminate the complexities inherent in operations and replace them with an easily addressable and configurable layer. Operations Virtualization makes true enterprise cloud computing possible.
This could be a competitor to CloudStack/OpenStack and others when combined with the power of vCD, next to that DynamicOps sees the need for build-in management of XenServer and Hyper-V too in their products, DynamicsOps has strategic alliances with both Microsoft and Citrix to reach this goal.
Nicira
With the even more recent acquisition of Nicira VMware got hold of a solution that’s build on “software designed datacenter” or software designed network, a couple of weeks ago I attended the Citrix Build A Cloud day at Schuberg Philis where Opscode, Rightscale and Schuberg Philis (Roeland Kuipers) gave presentations on their take on cloud computing and orchestration and automation. The presentations can be found here. Roeland talked about how Nicira helped Schuberg Philis to overcome their problems regarding networking in an impressive way, the software designed network solved a lot of network design issues for Schuberg Philis.
Looking at their website:
Nicira virtualizes the network, transforming the physical network into a pool of network capacity, moving security decisions to the edge of the network. This new model fundamentally changes the network security equation, for the first time meeting the needs of a dynamic cloud data center environment. Network virtualization delivers two key security benefits for cloud data centers, mobility and isolation.
In physical networks, security is typically built using centrally located policy enforcement or “choke points.” Security policies are enforced as traffic traverses the network and passes through inline devices such as routers, switches or firewalls. Access control lists and firewall rules are manually configured specific to the policy enforcement point to allow or deny access to statically placed workloads. However, clouds are dynamic by design; VMs come up, go down and move, and the network, including its security policies needs to adjust to the changes. The dynamic nature of cloud data centers makes the traditional network security model operationally unsustainable.
First steps..
Did VMware just took the first steps to a heterogeneous hypervisor cloud solution? By adding both DynamicOps and Nicira to their company they have all the tools to create a solution that can handle a heterogeneous hypervisor environment with automation and orchestration as key focus points while removing network design limitations by using software designed networks. I guess you can call that the first steps into multi hypervisor support although it will take some time to get up to speed and this is time that the competitors can use to build on their own solution. It really doesn’t even matter if VMware will succeed in this strategy but it’s good for IT because vendors will be pushed to deliver even better solutions.
Kees Baggerman
Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)
- Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
- Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019
- Checking power settings on VMs using powershell - September 11, 2019
- Updated: VM Reporting Script for Nutanix with Powershell - July 3, 2019
- Updated (again!): VM Reporting Script for Nutanix AHV/vSphere with Powershell - June 17, 2019
[…] VMware acquires DynamicOps and Nicira, first steps to a heterogeneous hypervisor cloud solution? […]