ITWire

Australian users will be able to put the new VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 through its paces from 10 September.

According to Aaron Steppat, VMware product marketing manager for cloud infrastructure and management, three versions of the cloud suite will be available – standard, advanced and enterprise. Each will have different levels of capability and be priced accordingly.

The company has also revamped its overall pricing policy and will licence the suites on a per cpu basis, irrespective of the number of cores according to Mr Steppat. The suites will also be provided with unlimited VRam access and unlimited virtual machine access to the applications in the three different levels.

He said that this would allow organisations to take advantage of more powerful hardware.

Mr Steppat said the suites allowed IT managers to set policies regarding the establishment and management of virtual data centres, and when a user dialed up a service from the virtual data centre, it would “inherit all that policy.” He said that “This is the opportunity for local businesses to move to hybrid clouds.”

Until the middle of December existing users of the earlier vCloud 5.0 tools will be able to upgrade to the standard version of vCloud 5.1 for free according to Mr Steppat.

While VMware would like to own the cloud provisioning market, it is facing competition from rivals including Microsoft, Citrix (with CloudStack) and OpenStack.

In Australia OpenStack has already secured a major customer, being selected as the basis for the $47 million national research cloud, NeCTAR which is currently under construction. The implementation is understood to be the largest OpenStack deployment outside of the US.