VMware has announced the new product VMware vCloud Director (vCD from now on). I've read the early blog posts and been in some conversations and know at this point I just can't give it any justice. The short view it is virtualizing a datacenter into software and then managing at that layer. After spending close to 2 hours both taking the vCD install lab (which was fantastic to show you the concepts by the way) and then talking with a brilliant individual from the vCloud Team (Paul from the APAC region), I know I need to chew on vCD a bit longer. Thankfully Yellow-Bricks has done an excellent write-up to give you a short intro to this new product offering.

VMware vCloud Director (vCD)

So go read it and come back. Pretty powerful stuff even at a 1.0.

If you are familiar with the concepts of organizations, VM Templates, network Fencing and self service that are presented from Lab Manager, you will quickly get about 75% of vCD. The other 25% is coming from Chargeback and vOrchestrator capabilities. The challenge with Lab Manager is being able to run true production out of it. The management is a bit limiting and constrained by size. vCD takes all those concepts and adds a few more and pushes up the scalability to Service Provider size where you need to deal with limits of 4095 VLANs and Petabytes of storage.

Does this mean that an SMB can't use vCD. I don't believe so. When I look at this I easily see Lab Manager as dead now. Why spend any resources on a less functional, less useful, more limited product when you have something you just need to right size in licensing for someone that needs to use it for a "Lab Manager style Test/Dev" environment? vCD can do everything we do in Lab Manager today along with being able to have production right next to it in the same management interface.

Lab Manager is Dead. Long Live Lab Manager.