VMware and Citrix announced their cloud initiatives at VMWorld last week. Up until then, the choice to enable an enterprise’s infrastructure as a service was limited to using products from any of these firms: 3Tera, Elastra, and Enomalism (open source).
From an architectural perspective, Citrix and VMware cloud initiatives broadly fall into the following categories:
1. Cloud services: Such services concern with enabling the existing virtualized environments by providing capabilities such as metering, chargeback models and accessing the infrastructure through an interface exposed via an API.
2. Orchestration and process automation services: The orchestration and process automation services are about dynamic provisioning of servers, deployment of application(s), graphical scripting, and back-up among other administration related tasks.
3. Application delivery services: Provides services or mechanisms to optimally utilize the provisioned virtual machines including the VM’s on the off premise cloud.
VMware announced its product Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDCOS) that is capable of cloud enabling an enterprise. VDCOS is built over the existing VMware Infrastructure product with additional features focusing on two areas:
a) Improvements over current capabilities in application and infrastructure virtualization.
b) Orchestration and workflow coordination capability between on premise and off premise virtual machines.
A complete description of all the services in the upcoming VDCOS product is listed here. Note that application delivery services must be integrated with existing application switches.
Citrix announced its cloud enabling product called Citrix Cloud Center (C3). In C3 the Xen cloud edition provides the automatic scaling of compute resources matching traffic needs, with the usual cloud computing features such metered usage, billing API access to the infrastructure similar to VMware VDCOS. However C3 is a more comprehensive solution when compared to VDCOS, because C3 bundles WANScaler and Netscaler. WANScaler is used for optimal data transfer between your enterprise (on premise datacenter) and cloud provider (ISV). Load balancing the user’s requests across the virtual machines between those hosted in on premise and off premise environments is imperative and this is achieved using Citrix Netscaler.
The diagram below shows the conceptual architecture of applying VMware VDCOS or C3 for cloud enabling an enterprise/private environment.
While Citrix’s strategy on offering cloud services seems to be more comprehensive. However it can be argued that the enterprise market is a diverse market and infrastructure solutions typically involve multiple vendors. For example, load balancing for environment virtualized by VMware can be done using BIG-IP F5 products and this can provide the benefit of deploying a flexible solution while leveraging existing investments. The partnering with the ISV’s by Citrix or VMware, would help enterprises in leveraging their experience (either on Citrix or VMware) when using the off premise cloud and this might be beneficial to VMware rather than Citrix, because of its strong presence in the enterprise market.
C3 and VDCOS are upcoming products and are not production ready yet. However the bottom line is these initiatives would provide the cloud providers and enterprises/customers with more choice.