VMware is taking its IT services to the next level. The cloud company launched vCenter Operations, a new cloud solution that boasts interoperability of computing assets, capacity and configurations, and is automated by analytics to work for today’s dynamic virtual and cloud environments. It will also eliminate as much human element as possible. Unlike traditional management, cloud computing is shared across multiple sources, delivery and capacity are vastly dynamic and configurations are flexible.

“For opportunistic organizations, the move to cloud computing may enable the ‘breaking’ of the traditional IT management model,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. “Decades of investment in complex infrastructures, processes and management tools have contributed to high IT operations and service delivery costs.

“Cloud computing, or more specifically, the cloud operating model, represents a real opportunity for enterprise IT to overcome the complexity that has been dragging down overall IT efficiency and agility. But to do this, we need to completely reassess the conventional wisdom of the role of management in relation to the build-out of these emerging cloud environments.”

Like resource allocation and load balancing, vCenter Operations will be tightly integrated with VMWare vSphere, as its function is to simplify numerous core system management functions via integration. Performance, capacity and configuration with lots of analytics assimilated into the system makes up VMware’s management approach.

vCenter is being assimilated within vSphere, and will improve infrastructure management functionality by collecting data from both physical components and management software, which will then be available through dashboards.  It proactively ensure service levels in dynamic cloud environments, getting to the root cause of performance problems faster, optimize deployments in “real-time” to enable self-service provisioning, and maintain compliance in the face of constant change. Here’s also a good break down of what the company’s doing.

“To us, cloud computing means dynamic resources that are self-provisioning, and VMware vCenter™ Operations is purpose-built to support this type of environment,” said Brian Alexander, systems architect, information technology, Mentor Graphics Corporation. “Two things set VMware vCenter™ Operations apart: the hooks into VMware vSphere that give it broad understanding of the system — storage, network, VM performance — and the analytics that will transform the data it gleans into actionable information.”

“The entire ecosystem, VMware included, is moving asap to deliver value beyond the hypervisor,” David Vellante, founder of Wikibon explains. “For VMware to continue to grow it needs to get into the management space and has been doing so  for a while. It’s ‘acquisition’ of Ionix assets last year was an example and  this further strengthens VMware’s management portfolio and puts it squarely up against the  likes of Tivoli (IBM), BMC, HP OpenView and other management frameworks (e.g. MSFT). VMware’s mantra is for every $1 spent of VMware licenses, $14-$15 is spent in the ecosystem. However VMware needs to increasingly compete with its partners to continue to grow.

“VMware is trying to be a convenient stop for IT shops and large service providers. Not quite a “one-stop-shop” but close. It’s trying to create as much ubiquity as possible in the  base so that it can move data from private to public clouds and back and owning a piece of the management stack is  key to that.

The other backdrop here  is VMware is taking a page from Microsoft and continue to advance its value add into the ecosystem space. If you’re a pure hardware vendor, you are safe but who is a pure hardware vendor. It’s clear VMware is going after dominance of the data center and is walking a fine line between adding value for its customers and alienating partners. In the end, imo VMware wins because of the strong momentum in the user base –it’s  becoming a de facto standard in enterprise IT. The wildcard is how well Vmware can do with cloud service providers who probably don’t want to (en masse anyway) pay up for VMware’s stack). Many CSPs prefer to use open source and roll-your-own options. There’s still plenty of room to do this and plenty of room for value add but the walls are closing in on the management piece of the stack as VMware circles the wagons.

vCenter Operations has three editions to choose from:

• vCenter Operations Standard offers performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Advanced adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

The VMware cloud solution’s potency has raked in some big customers, such as Amazon Web Services, among others. The giant recently released a plug-in enabling customers to import their virtual machines from VMware’s virtualization management software. It has also released a preview of another plug-in called vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, offering virtualization management for non-vSpere hypervisors. EMC is another major cloud service rolling out it-as-a-service initiatives as well.

Generally speaking, the major cloud service providers are moving towards more IT as a Service capabilities.  It’s also a product that smaller competitors are promoting as a point of differentiation. IT-as-a-Service is going to become more tightly integrated with existing cloud infrastructures, and will develop a larger demand from cloud clients. EMC for that matter is determined to move from “IT as a Cost Center” to “IT as a Service” model, improving strategies on infrastructure, applications and end-users access.

“VMware’s work in cloud computing will help us reach our strategic vision of using virtualization to improve economics by using resources more efficiently and delivering our products to our customers faster,” said Glenn Harper, vice president and chief infrastructure architect, Sabre Holdings.

“VMware’s cloud infrastructure solutions will help us focus on the features our customers need – rather than technologies needed to support IT. We are very excited about the direction VMware is taking with its cloud infrastructure portfolio, making cloud computing a reality for the enterprise and for Sabre.”