Here’s a question I get….well….pretty much DAILY. I published an article a while back on What Can I run in vCloud Air, but that was more about really, technically speaking most things can. Mostly the issue that comes into play that I won’t dive into is the licensing and compliance around application mobility. Every ISV has different rules and different ways you may or may not be able to do it, and in fact the vCloud Air group has an entire ISV team dedicated to this. However, I always find the question in the title of this article interesting. The reason is when I get the question usually my answer is, I have no idea!
Okay so why is my answer that? That’s pretty simple really, the offering is ‘Self-Service’. What I mean is that VMware is not doing managed services of applications. VMware vCloud Air is Infrastructure as a Service so people sign up, deploy virtual machines, and load applications. Those applications they install, VMware has no visibility into, unless they were part of the effort through services or other reasons. There is monitoring or the virtual machines themselves, but what’s running INSIDE them VMware does not know and in many cases does not want to know, which is the case with most IaaS providers. It’s not the place of the provider to know what’s running unless they have rules or restrictions about it, and even then it’s not easy to do.
For example some hosting providers for years have put rules around hosting things like adult material or other questionable material if the company themselves does not agree with it. However, this concept has been going on for years that people who pay for infrastructure really can run anything they choose. So I may hear about a customer running something as a use case like Exchange if I was part of the discussion. All I am saying is day-to-day it’s not something I always hear about.
All I will say is this. Just think about how you might consume IaaS cloud, and does anyone know what you are running right now? If not you pretty much understand my response here.