VMware Updates Story on VDC-OS and Private Cloud

VMware is widely expected to announce the next step in its road to its previously announced Virtual Data Center operating system in a webinar on Tuesday, April 21st.

The goal is not primarily to explain the little-understood, still unrealized Virtual Data Center Operating System concept that VMware announced last summer, as part of VMware executives' ongoing promotion of the idea that companies should create internal cloud-computing systems for their traditional IT infrastructures, according to sources briefed on the announcement.

The intent is to change the positioning and explanations of the VDC-OS in the context of the company's more recent changes in product names and feature sets. The company's focus is changing -- with the impending announcement of vSphere, the upgrade to VMware's core Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI-3) product set-to one that encourages customers to virtualize their IT infrastructures within a "private cloud," automate management and provisioning within that cloud, and expand VMware's reach into virtual desktops, according to presentations made at the company's Partner Summit in Florida this week.

The new vSphere product set is expected to include the latest version of VMware's hypervisor technology, VMware business partner Unisys told CIO.com's sister publication Network World, earlier this week.

"The whole focus is about cloud computing and rolling out a platform for cloud and the transition to the operating system for the data center," says one source. "There will be some rebranding around the release of vSphere; it won't be the VDC-OS anymore, but the concept is the same."

The company announced this week a reorganization of its reseller channel program that is designed to increase the ability of integrators to sell VMware infrastructure products to small- and mid-sized customers.

Taken together, the repositioning of vSphere-the new name for the upgrade to VMware's core Virtual Infrastructure 3-the changes are designed to help VMware reinforce its position as the leading virtualization vendor and stave off competition from Microsoft, especially among new adopters of virtualization and mid-sized companies that might be attracted by the lower sticker price of Microsoft's Hyper-V.

VMware is also prepping for forthcoming technology hooks that it has previously publicly said will let customers "burst up" on demand from their own private clouds to public cloud providers when extra computing capacity is needed.

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