vCloud Hybrid Cloud – A big day for VMware customers

As you’ve probably already seen out in the news, Twitter feeds and forums around the net, today marked a potentially historic day in the world of Cloud services and Network Virtualization. This happened because of some significant announcements at the EMC | VMware Strategic Forum (video is available here: http://www.emc.com/corporate/investor-relations/strategic-forum-2013/index.htm).

First I wanted to touch on an exciting service offering that VMware has presented which is their Hybrid Cloud service which is a direct competitor to other major players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Introducing vCloud Hybrid Cloud

As of today, VMware became an official competitor in the public/hybrid cloud environment. The IaaS offering is available for demo at http://vcloudservice.vmware.com for 90 days free of charge!

For lots of info on the vCloud service, visit http://vcloud.vmware.com/evaluate-cloud where you complete your evaluation sign up. As they describe there, you will receive 2GB and 2CPU for your test drive period. And for getting up and running there are lots of great links to resources such as the vCloud Community forums.

06-vcloudeval

The interface for the vCloud service is neat and tidy, and very usable. Once you get your login for your trial, you will go to the main page and login as admin@nnnn where nnnn is your assigned instance that is provided in the welcome email.

The home screen is a nice uncluttered interface. And for the grammar lovers, you will find the “Your Clouds’ Statistics” to be a nice touch 🙂

I’ve deployed one server already which shows in the My Cloud tab with the status information and some control buttons:

02-mycloud

If you click the far right icon in your machine it shows the extended details:

machine

Next we can click on the View My Virtual Networks tab to show the active rules that are in place:

03-vnetworks

These rules are the default created to provide inbound and outbound access to the machine. As you can see, it is familiar for the vCNS (vCloud Networking and Security) users.

And for the vCloud users, we can use the very familiar vCloud Director interface on the View in vCloud Director tab:

05-vclouddirector

This is literally the first step in using the vCloud Hybrid Cloud service. Once you get into the detail on the vCloud Director interface you have so much more capability in front of you.

Why is it Hybrid Cloud?

This is a very interesting offering and its name caught many people off guard. The service is being touted as a Hybrid Cloud service. This is because you will be able to connect to your native vCloud environment through the vCloud Connector, or you can also connect to any of a number of other public vCloud hosting environments.

Much more to come on this, but I’d highly recommend that you get over to vcloud.vmware.com to read up and get your demo started!

2 thoughts on “vCloud Hybrid Cloud – A big day for VMware customers”

  1. I’d say the competition is good for the industry. There’s still many questions and confusion regarding what the cloud is. The provider that does the best job of explaining this will succeed.

    Reply

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