At VMworld yesterday, Cisco launched a version of their server provisioning platform compatible with VMWare's ESX hypervisor. What VFrame Data Centre does is that it configures remotely and dynamically a bare-metal server with images of OSes (Windows, Linux and now ESX) and/or (virtual) applications that are typically centrally stored in a storage area network (SAN) device. In Cisco's scenario, the network becomes the virtual management platform that allocates both storage and network resources to bare-metal servers.

"VMware doesn't do anything like this at all. VMware don't really do much management at the bare metal server level. They would leave it up to the customers to go configure to some of their management consoles the ESX load image and configuring it to a set of shared storage environment. There's a fairly complex set of configurations that users will have to go through", said Bill Erdman, marketing director of Cisco's server virtualisation business unit.

VMware Tools Lack Granularity

The Cisco exec also had doubts on the real benefits customers will get from VMware's embedded hypervisor, the ESX 3i/light:

"[ESX 3i/light] is a good attachment model for VMware but not necessarily a model that gives the customer ubiquity in a heterogeneous server pool. Because then the servers are uniquely characterise for VMware. ", said Erdman.

Despite the critics, Cisco is an early adopter of VMware's technology. It's IT department has already "virtualised" more than 1400 physical Intranet servers down to 120 servers. The next step is to consolidate "Internet facing" servers like the ones hosting Cisco's e-learning applications.

"When you start mixing Intranet and Internet applications together, you need a good security partition. In the current beta version of VFrame we are not offering yet this kind of granularity. This will come in the second half of next year where you will be able to match a VLAN (virtual Lan) to a virtual machine, and not only to a physical server. Moreover, the virtual machine network services will automatically change when you move that VM to another physical server using VMotion. We are really at the beginning of all this", added the Cisco director.

Cisco expects to ship VFrame for VMware in the first quarter of 2008.