IBM, VMware Ally to Push Hybrid Cloud Adoption
VMware earlier this week announced a refresh of its hybrid cloud management platform that ties those tools more closely to its NSX network virtualization platform for software-defined datacenters. The upgrades were intended to help configure networks and enable micro-segmentation, which VMware executives stress is a key use case for NSX.
VMware followed up that cloud platform refresh with an announcement on Thursday (Oct. 15) that allows enterprise customers to extend their existing on-premise VMware infrastructure into IBM's cloud through NSX.
As it seeks to boost hybrid cloud adoption, IBM stressed that its cloud infrastructure also is positioned to run VMware vSphere virtualization operating system deployments via SoftLayer bare-metal servers. IBM and VMware have already partnered to provide cloud tools like SoftLayer to joint enterprise customers.
The upshot, the partners said, is that joint customers can now move workloads and applications across IBM's cloud datacenters while retaining performance and avoiding network bottlenecks. The arrangement also would allow customers, for example, to perform live workload migrations between geographically dispersed datacenters running on a single VMware environment.
The partners stressed that the ability to move workloads and applications across continents creates new deployment options for customers' cloud services. The new deployment options also seek to boost overall adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure as VMware and new parent Dell Inc. zero in on the enterprise cloud market.
Specifically, the new live migration capability would allow users to move an entire virtual machine between physical servers without downtime, the partners said. Along with NSX and SoftLayer's private network, IBM claimed a 15-fold increase in round trip time, a network latency metric for determining the time required for a signal or packet to travel to and from specific source, would speed live workload migrations.
The hybrid cloud partnership also includes VMware's Virtual SAN for dedicated network storage as well as preservation of networks states. The latter is enabled by the fact that virtual machine migration via vSphere's vMotion feature preserves the execution state, network address and active network connections in order to avoid downtime.
IBM also said its Cloudbuilder service will now include support for and deployment of vSphere 6. That support is intended to speed implementation of vSphere, permitting the migration of workloads over the hybrid cloud infrastructure while leveraging a batch of cloud-based deployment capabilities.
That, the partners asserted, would help reduce the risk and cost of hybrid cloud implementation.
The new joint cloud services that include VMware's NSX and virtual storage-area network will be available on the IBM Cloud beginning in November. IBM added that new cloud offering would include monthly billing and processor-based pricing.
Underpinning the network virtualization portion of the IBM-VMware cloud partnership is NSX 6.2. The latest version was released in August. "Our customers want to use capacity across datacenters, recover from disasters more quickly and increasingly and take advantage of the economics and agility of implementing a hybrid cloud model," VMware's Chris King noted in a blog post announcing the NSX release.
