VM Order Hotline
I really don’t have anything to do with the virtualization industry anymore, except as a user. I still keep up with the industry. I noticed the announcement of this new VMware app called vCloud Director during VMworld 2010. I just ran into this more detailed description of the product and couldn’t help but think of a product idea I have had for years.
In maybe 2005, we ran into a project by Richard Garsthagen called the “VM Order Hotline”, which is an application that allows the user to request a virtual machine to be provisioned.
This VM Order Hotline application is something our users were requesting, but it needed more. The idea evolved over the years, but the core was based on the hotline concept. It needed to operate without administrator intervention. It needed to have access lists, cost centers and approval structures. It needs a list of template configurations available (OS, RAM, vcpu…). It needed to then facilitate the chargeback process. This process would be simpler than actual usage, but mirror the cost structure of leading cloud providers. Simplicity; per hour allocated vcpus or per month memory. A more consistent revenue stream for IT than cpu mhz used for example. The users could interact with their VM if desired. You could call this a portal, similar to the GoGrid portal. If I were a marketing guy, this could be a “Private Cloud Portal”. Or maybe something AAS.
The advantages with this idea is that IT puts control in the end users hands. They can provision a VM and get immediate results. If they want to buy some vm sprawl, so be it. Depending on who you are, it could be a way of decentralizing VM administration but still centralizing the core infrastructure.
Over those years, my two main virtualization related application ideas were this VM hotline and X_Factor. X_Factor received all of my time for two reasons.
First, I needed XF to do my job as an architect and capacity planner involves too many manual steps and spreadsheets. But that is a whole topic of by itself.
Second, I felt VMware would release this product themselves (they do have some history of competing with partners). They released Lifecycle Manager in 2008. This was based on technology from the Dunes acquisition. The list price here was extremely high; so high that no customers cared to dig further. As I understand it, Lifecycle Manager could only be this order hotline application with approvals and chargebacks after extensive amounts of customer development (with propriety languages). I was not interested in spending my time developing code that relied on purchasing this expensive app in addition to mine.
So here we are. We have vCloud Director 1.0. Sounds like it needs to get the chargeback fully integrated. They have this “cloud” support built in. Hopefully VMware has not forgotten about the simplicity needed by the internal IT staff that runs the vast majority of the VMs in the world. I wish I had time to figure out what it is all about.
