Roundup: VMware Launches Public Cloud

On Tuesday VMware (VMW) unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud built and operated by VMware. The virtualization pioneer's entry into the public cloud arena prompted lots of analysis and commentary from around the web. Here's a look at some of the most notable posts:

Gartner - Lydia Leong comments on her CloudPundit blog: "VMware has previously had a strategy of being an arms dealer to service providers who wanted to offer cloud IaaS. In addition to the substantial ecosystem of providers who use VMware virtualization as part of various types of IT outsourcing offerings, VMware also signed up a lot of vCloud Powered partners, each of which offered what was essentially vCloud Director (vCD) as a service. ... In theory, this was a sound channel strategy. In practice, it didn’t work."

The Register - From Timothy Prickett Morgan: "the vCloud Hybrid Service is not so much about competing against AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and other public clouds as it is about giving the now 500,000 customers using the ESXi hypervisor to virtualize their servers a place where they can burst their workloads and a reason to buy vCloud Director and other tools in the VMware box."

Ars Technica - Here's the "where" question answered:"VMware's US-based services will be available to early access customers in June and will be generally available in the third quarter of this year from data centers in Santa Clara, CA; Dallas, TX; Las Vegas, NV; and Sterling, VA. Services will be offered from data centers in Asia and the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) sometime in 2014. Customers outside the US aren't prohibited from using the US-based services, but they would have to handle some latency."

ITworld - Another reason the Vmware cloud isn't an Amazon killer: "Individual developers won’t be able to sign up quickly and easily to start using compute services from VMware. The vCloud Hybrid Services are sold either on an annual or monthly basis. I’m not exactly sure yet but that sounds like services will be sold the same way that VMware products are sold today – through sales people or partners. There won’t be any chance to visit a web site, plop down a credit card and get to work."

GigaOm - Jordan Novet has details on pricing: "The vCloud Hybrid Service actually has two flavors: a Dedicated Cloud mode has “physically isolated and reserved compute resources” for predictable workloads and a Virtual Private Cloud for seasonal workloads that require greater elasticity but are multitenant in nature. The former service will start at 13 cents an hour for a 1 GB virtual machine with a single processor on an annual basis, while the latter will start at 4.5 cents an hour on a monthly basis."