Interop: Cloud provider advocates multiple hypervisor support

While most cloud infrastructure service providers design data centers around VMware or the xenserver of Citrix, a growing trend is that service providers allow users to choose the virtualization software that drives the cloud product, according to some analysts.

John Landau, senior vice president of Tata Communications, said that users are John Landau programs, so we have to work hard to support them.

But from a customer's perspective, what is the management program that the service provider is really important to use?

"From a technical point of view, this should not be important," Agatha 451, a market research firm that tracks the global cloud market, said Agatha Poon. She says the provider will also provide multiple management programs as the provider strengthens the platform as a service product.

Management programs are already fairly commercialized and have a variety of brands, such as VMware, Jie, and KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V that provide similar functionality. However, there is a reason for users to care about the management procedures used by the provider.

Philbert Sch Philbert Shih, a cloud analyst at Businessesflat-out Research, a market-study firm, said it would be helpful to have a common management program, especially if a customer seeks to move the workload between their own station environment and the public cloud. For example, this can reduce the need to rewrite an application to work with a specific management program.

However, if a company uses the cloud for a new application deployed in the cloud and wants to use it throughout its lifecycle, it doesn't matter what the service provider's management program is.

Allen Ley (Allan leinwand), when designing a hybrid cloud that drives the gaming website Zynga, does need to have the ability to migrate workloads between the private cloud and the public cloud. Speaking at the Interop conference this week, Leinwand said his approach was to have a basic workload and to rent the highest amount of work.

This means that Zynga's "zcloud" infrastructure has enough site capacity to handle the company's general it requirements. When new games are introduced to increase capacity requirements, Zcloud uses public cloud resources. To facilitate the effort to migrate between internal Zcloud and Amazon Web services, Ryder has designed Zcloud to look and feel as much like Amazon's Web services as possible. Part of this work uses the same management program devices as Amazon Web services. This is Citrix's Xen management program.

Ellen Rubin, Terremark's vice president for cloud operations, also delivered a speech at the Interop conference. More and more companies are experimenting with multiple management program formats in-house, he says. The service provider should be able to accommodate multiple management programs. While about 90% per cent of enterprises use VMware management programs in their internal virtualization, she predicts that more than half of them are experimenting with multiple hypervisor formats, typically in test and development environments or in specific departments.

Although Terremark uses VMware management programs, the company does not want to disengage from these customers. This is why Terremark acquired Cloudswitch in 2011. Rubin is the co-founder of the company. Cloudswitch specializes in developing products that migrate workloads between internal and cloud environments, or to create mixed cloud products, regardless of the basic management procedures.

There are some smaller companies. For example, 6Fusion does not matter what management program you choose to use. 6Fusion is a software that is provided in the cloud as a service, between the onsite solution and the cloud, allowing the workload to be migrated between the two environments.

With real interoperability, you can move a virtual machine running on a VMware platform to another location that configures the background Xen management program, and there is no noticeable difference, Rubin says. Service providers currently do not have products that provide this functionality.

Businessesflat-out Research analyst Shi said the trend will grow steadily in the future. At the same time, more and more companies will support users to allow easier migration of work between their internal and public clouds. (Compiled/Populus euphratica)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)