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.

Sun announced the acquisition of the producer of software for cloud computing - Q-layer, a Belgium based company. Q-layer has been founded to provide a virtual data center for cloud computing services offered by data centеr service providers.

The company's solution is to abstract the hardware, storage and network facilities of a physical data centers would into a Database Abstraction Layer (DAL). DAL also features a language to instantiate and operate a virtual private data center (VPDC) in a cloud. Q-layer's NephOS software operates through existing virtualization hypervisor technologies like those Microsoft, Sun, VMware and Xen provide.

Users can provision their own virtual data centres through a web interface, specifying virtualised server, storage, network bandwidth and application components. The company's technology enables data centers to provide scalable services and reorganize and customize the solution they offer quickly and simply.

Q-layer is another step to help Sun to strengthen its virtual data center solutions for cloud computing and to better compete VMware. Sun also aims to provide its customers with a cloud computing and web hosting solution that will help them to compete with the cloud data center services provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.