Comments on: Recent IT management announcements

By: geep

geep — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:38:24 +0000

Actually, the VI Java effort is not an official VMware offering. It is
something that an engineer from VMware has put out in an attempt to hide
some of the complexities of the underlying web-services interface.

VMware is already exposing a CIM based model for hardware health monitoring
and for storage virtualization (SMASH and SMI-S). The problem with SVPC is
that it is a young standard and not quite ready for prime-time. There are
innate issues with the data model that make it impossible to scale in a large
infrastructure. So any solution would need to rely on extensions to make it
be enterprise-ready. And that is not much of a standard then. So the right
answer is to work with the standards bodies on improving SVPC and then put out
a solution that customers can actually use.
Till then, toolkits written on top of the VI API are a good alternative. The
VI Perl Toolkit was the first one and the PowerShell implementation really
goes a long way to make life easier. A Java toolkit would make for a nice
evolution to that.

By: fermin

fermin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:06:08 +0000

Yes, maybe I was a bit ironic (sorry :) but, in fact, I think this is a clever strategy for VMware. However, what I wonder (and so tries to point the last sentence in my comment) is if they could keep this two “faces” in the long-term future or, eventually, they need to focus on one and give up the other (and in this case which ones and when).

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:26:40 +0000

Hi Fermin. The fact that they are doing both is pretty clear but I don’t see this negatively. I interpret your last sentence as being ironic but that in fact you too don’t mind the options offered, correct? After all, no-one calls Twitter duplicitous for offering JSON *and* XML versions of its API…

By: fermin

fermin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:18:48 +0000

So, it seems clear that VMware is playing a double game, using DMTF to promote model-centric platform-agnostic virtual infrastructure management but, in addition, providing “ad hoc” management models for their products.

How long they could keep this two faces? :)