The incumbents are no longer alone on the hybrid computing bandwagon. Amazon, the world’s largest provider of public cloud services, entered the fray this week with the release of a connector for VMware’s vCenter Server platform, which is used to manage environments running its widely-used ESXi hypervisor.

The company touts that the integration allows virtualization admins to spin up EC2 compute instances and migrate images to the cloud directly from within vCenter without having to familiarize themselves with a new interface. The free connector also offers role-based access control capabilities, templates for automating common workloads and a tagging mechanism aimed at making it easier for users to track exactly how much resources are being consumed.

All that value-added functionality is aimed at giving enterprises yet more reason to use AWS over VMware’s competing infrastructure-as-a-service platform, which is not nearly as mature from a technical standpoint but has the advantage of providing native support for on-premise virtual environments.

VMware returned to the headlines a few days after Amazon’s announcement when the virtualization giant announced that it is discontinuing its Heartbeat continuous availability offering, which is licensed from the Neverfail Group and protects against network failures. Responding to users’ surprise over the move, the company pointed out that its software packs built-in failover capabilities that suffice for most environments.

While VMware scaling back on its presence in the transport layer, other top enterprise vendors are doing just the opposite. Oracle this week revealed that it has joined the OpenDaylight Project, an industry consortium focused on  developing standards for software-defined networking, as a silver member. The database maker said that it intends to integrate the group’s technology  into  Solaris, the UNIX-based enterprise operating system it obtained as part of the 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

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