VMware, HP Team Up On Virtual Data Center OSVMware, HP Team Up On Virtual Data Center OS

Hewlett-Packard and VMware are joining forces to bring VMware's concept of a virtual data center operating system closer to reality. It marks the second alliance in two months between VMware and a traditional systems management vendor.

Last month, VMware partnered with CA, supplier of CA-Unicenter and other systems management software, to integrate VMware Stage Manager with CA's Data Center Automation Manager. The VMware product generates virtual environments that match production settings where new or updated software combinations can be run for test purposes, before deployment. Unexpected conflicts between updated software and the existing environment is a frequent cause of data center failures.

VMware's newfound closeness to well-established systems management vendors reflect its desire to more closely integrate its ESX hypervisor operation with the underlying physical assets and software infrastructure. VMware will soon be competing with Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor and Microsoft System Center, which can run both physical and virtual Windows assets.

A key part of VMware's expanded collaboration with HP will see VMware licensing HP's Discovery and Dependency Mapping software. When the functionality of that piece is added to VMware's growing library of virtual machine management software in the second half of 2009, it will allow VMware to produce ConfigControl, announced at VMworld in Las Vegas last September.

ConfigControl will be a rules-based virtual machine configuration system that can manage VM generation across the data center. It will be added to VMware's core management system, Virtual Center, now known as just vCenter. Once rules are set for the provisioning of a set of virtual machines, ConfigControl will enforce them across the data center, regardless of where or by whom a VM is generated.

"Rather than reinvent the wheel, we will leverage what HP has developed in infrastructure discovery technologies," said Melinda Wilkin, VMware senior director of marketing, in an interview. ConfigControl will bring VMware a step closer to supplying software that can be described as a data center operating system, Wilkin added.

VMware will expand other offerings around VMware Stage Manager and HP's data center self-provisioning products that came with the Opsware acquisition a year ago, Wilkin said. A planned vCenter CapacityIQ, due sometime in 2009, will continuously monitor data center computing capacity and adjust the sizes of virtual machines based on demand.

Likewise, a planned vCenter Orchestrator will allow the development of workflows through a drag-and-drop interface that automate tasks through the underlying software infrastructure.

"By integrating HP technologies for application management with VMware vCenter ..., we would be able to offer our joint customers an ideal foundation for their next-generation datacenters," said Raghu Raghuram, general manager of VMware's server business unit in announcing the collaboration.