VMware has announced vCloud, its ambitious plan for public and private computing clouds six month ago. For those who missed the announcement we have to say that VMware considers vCloud as an "initiative" not as new product or platform.

The purpose of vCloud is to demonstrate VMware's technology capacity in virtualization technologies and to attract more attention from corporate customers and public institution.

John Foley, from Information Week also says that the company's main goal however is "to enable application hosting in the cloud, including multicloud interoperability, using a VMware API called the Cloud vServices API, as well as VMware's implementation of the industry standard Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), and other VMware technologies".

In an article titled "VMware To Take Its Next Steps Into The Cloud" Mr. Foley says that he had a conversation with VMware's CTO Stephen Herrod about his company's future developments.

Herrod explained that VMware is focused to develop solutions in three main areas: internal or private clouds; public cloud services; and federating multiple clouds.

In the field of "private clouds" the company entails bringing some of the capabilities of public cloud services, including self-service provisioning and usage-based billing, to the corporate data center. VMware also works to secure private clouds by isolating VMs in environments where multiple business units share IT resources.

Steve Herrod told Information Week that some of VMware's customers "already have taken it upon themselves to develop capabilities such as self-provisioning, chargeback, and VM isolation".

In the filed of "public clouds" VMware plans to deliver a software stack for public cloud service providers. The virtualization producer is developing capabilities to let them to offer on-demand, subscription services from their self-service portals.

The third area of VMware's cloud strategy, according to Information Week is to enable interoperable, hybrid clouds.

VMware To Reveal More About Their Cloud Strategy At VMword Europe 2009

The annual conference of VMware VMworld Europe 2009 open within a few days, on February 24. in Cannes, France. The company has already published "Speaker and Session Catalog". The organizers says that the keynotes will be posted for viewing once they have taken place.

The event offers 3 full days of conference activities that include:

- General session keynotes from the President and CEO of VMware - Paul Maritz, its Chief Technology Officer - Dr. Stephen Herrod, and Managing Director of SAP Hosting - Dr. Wolfgang Krips.

- More than 150 sessions

- Hands-on labs, where you conference participants can see the technology first-hand and ask questions in an interactive environment.

Virtualized IT and hosting environments and applications that run in virtualized environments were the main agenda during the recent Parallels Summit 2009 in Las Vegas. The Parallels CEO Serguei Belousov explained that it company calls this type of environment - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). He also said that it offers more cost effective approach to businesses ir order to have optimized IT infrastructures, than traditional PC or traditional servers, when it comes to enterprise virtualization.

According to Parallels VDI allows end-users to see and interact with exactly the same OS and applications they used to use on their desktops. With the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) however the users' OS and applications are hosted on centralized, remote storage solution.

Parallels underlines that VDI is also a virtualized application and it can be further optimized and consolidated in order high efficiency to be reached.

PCWorld magazine quotes Parallels sources, which say that typically, organizations can get up to 150 virtual desktops on a Dual CPU Quad Core server with 32GB RAM.

The virtuzlization producers claims that VDI removes many difficulties that businesses experience in the process of maintaining traditional desktop systems. The company says that within VDI applications and patches can be rolled out more efficiently, and there is greater control inside the IT environment, than anyone has within traditional desktop network.

The main benefit for businesses is that PC management will become easier and the cost of desktop computing will be reduced. Parallels says that any company takes advantage of data center licensing and saves money on buying, software licensing and also managing a large number of desktop PCs.

In its report "Energy Savings via Virtualization: Green IT on a Budget" the analytical agency Gartner says that an effective virtualization reduces server energy consumption by up to 82% and data center and floor space by up to 85%.

in his opening keynote at the Parallels Summit, the company's CEO Serguei Belousov said that virtualization is about to become a mainstream in IT. According to him large-scale corporates will be the first that will fully virtualiaze teir IT infrastructure within the next few years. SMBs will follow them, and within a decade consumers will also work in virtualized environments.