VMware vCloud Hybrid Service Provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Jumping straight into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) race with Amazon and Microsoft Azure, VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger recently announced VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service. vCloud Hybrid Service is an IaaS cloud operated by VMware. vCloud Hybrid Service will extend the existing VMware software into the public cloud allowing both on-premise and cloud infrastructure to be managed by the same vSphere tools that administrators are already familiar with.

Related: Microsoft's New Windows Azure IaaS Challenges Amazon

Built on vSphere, the vCloud Hybrid Service is designed to make it easy for organizations currently using vSphere to incorporate cloud services into their organizations. Customers will be able to extend their existing skills, tools, networking, and security models across both on-premise and off-premise environments. vCloud Hybrid Service will support the thousands of applications and more than 90 operating systems that are certified to run on vSphere.

Automated Replication, Monitoring, and High Availability

vCloud Hybrid Service will offer automated replication, monitoring, and high availability for business-critical applications. vCloud Hybrid Service will make use of the advanced features of vSphere, including VMware vMotion, High Availability (HA), and the Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS). Virtual networking will enable customers to use virtual networking to securely extend existing Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks from their on-premise data centers to the vCloud Hybrid Service cloud.

Related: Integrating vSphere and Hyper-V

VMware will establish four data centers in the United States:

Data centers in Asia and the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) will be established sometime in 2014.

2 vCloud Hybrid Service Subscription Options

VMware will offer the vCloud Hybrid Service with two subscription options. The first is a dedicated service with physically isolated and reserved compute resources and a private cloud instance. This dedicated offering will be sold on an annual basis starting at 13 cents per hour for a high available, fully redundant 1GB virtual machine (VM) with 1 processor. The second subscription option is a multitenant virtual private cloud with dedicated allocations for customers. The virtual cloud option is sold on a monthly basis starting at 4.5 cents per hour for a highly available, fully redundant 1GB VM with 1 processor.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will be available in June through an Early Access program, with general service availability in the US expected in Q3 2013. For more detailed information on VMware’s vCloud Service, you might want to check out the blog post "A Look Inside vCloud Hybrid Service" by Jason Lochhead, VMware’s Chief Architect, Cloud Infrastructure Services.