Bond between VMware and Cisco deepens
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A long time in the making, the VMware and Cisco integration is finally unveiled....
Cisco and VMware today announced the tight integration of their systems management technologies, an effort that will make it simpler for customers to automate the provisioning of both the physical and virtual infrastructure assets required to support networked data centre applications.
The links between Cisco’s VFrame Data Centre systems management suite and VMware’s VI3 virtual infrastructure management tools are the first fruits of a 15 month-long collaboration between the companies, which culminated last month with Cisco’s acquistion of a 2.5% in VMware prior to its recent IPO.
Working with VMware adds a vital virtual machine provisioning and management element to Cisco’s emerging strategy for creating next generation, service-oriented data centre infrastructure – it’s so-called Data Centre 3.0 vision. Whilst from VMware’s perspective, by linking with VFrame, VI3 users can extend the provisioning of virtual machines to include the orchestration of associated physical and logical resources, including network devices, storage and underlying physical servers.
In broader market terms, the union of Cisco’s physical server and network device oriented tools with VMware’s virtual is likely to be followed a spate of similar announcements between established and emerging systems automation players seeking to bridge the gap between the world’s of virtual and physical infrastructure resources.
Earlier this year, for instance, Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Opsware was motivated by similar strategic goals. However, according to Bill Erdman, marketing director of Cisco’s virtualisation business unit, the combination of conventional systems monitoring environments, such as HP’s OpenView, and largely server-oriented provisioning tools like Opsware’s don’t go far enough.
“A generation of systems is emerging that needs a more holistic approach to management. In our view they [Opsware] are really only doing image management, not services management” said Erdman.
When VFrame Data Centre 1.2 ships in the first quarter of next year, said Erdman, it will represent an important next step in Cisco’s redefinition of the role of the data centre administrator. “That role isn’t just about systems management, and it’s not just about storage management or about network management, it’s about all those things,” said Erdman.
