They Used to be Called Operating Systems — Now They’re ‘Clouds’

At this week’s VMworld, VMware unvieled something called its “Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS).”

According to VMWare, the Virtual Datacenter OS enables users to “efficiently pool all types of hardware resources – servers, storage and network – into an aggregated on-premise cloud – and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.”

VMWare added that “datacenters running on the Virtual Datacenter OS are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. With the Virtual Datacenter OS from VMware, businesses large and small can benefit from the flexibility and the efficiency of the ‘lights-out’ datacenter.”

Sounds good, but what exactly does VMWare’s VD-OS bring that isn’t available from your traditional OS, be it Linux, Windows, or z/OS?  Don’t all the OSes have the mission of abstracting hardware and system resources into an aggregated service layer (“on-premise cloud”)?  Is VD-OS intended to sit on top of the multitude of OSes that may exist across an enterprise, or outright replace those OSes? As pointed out by Mary-Jo Foley, Some say VD-OS is a direct competitor to Microsoft Windows 2008 Server. However, Microsoft may be going after different types of clouds.

There’s certainly a good case that can be made for virtualization — both from a business and IT management sense. But it’s unclear what a virtual OS can bring to the table, othe than more confusion.

VMWare appears to be targeting environments that already have been vortualized to some extent. In a related post, Scott Lowe brings some clarity to the purpose of VD-OS, noting that “what VMware is working on is an OS for the virtual datacenter, not a virtual OS for the datacenter. The distinction is important. VDC-OS isn’t intended to be an OS for all aspects of the datacenter. It’s intended to be an OS for all aspects of the virtual datacenter.”