VMware Brings Partners Auto Provisioning Of Cloud Services

VMware on Wednesday unveiled its new VMware vCloud Integration Manager to help service providers add automation to their VMware vCloud Director-based clouds.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is aimed at helping service providers automate the deployment and decommissioning of clouds using the company's vCloud platform, said Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services for the virtualization and cloud technology vendor.

"It allows service providers to provision cloud customers directly, or allows their reseller partners to provision their own customers," Lodge said.

By automating the provisioning process, VMware helps its channel partners, who account for 80 percent of the company's revenue, cut the cost of deploying clouds while speeding up the revenue from such deployments, he said.

vCloud Integration Manager sits between a customer portal and other VMware technologies including its vCloud Director shared infrastructure automatic provisioning application, vSphere virtualization software, vShield Edge virtual data center perimeter security software, and vCenter Chargeback Manager automated chargeback software, Lodge said.

"It manages the process of building a product set that can be provisioned automatically, and configures those offerings according to the customer's requirements," he said.

vCloud Integration Manager allows service providers to set up a product catalog of available services to customers. Service providers can also specify which of their services are available to their reseller partners to provide to their customers for automatic provisioning, Lodge said. "Service providers can also give quota limits so one reseller doesn't exhaust all the service provider's capacity," he said.

To set up the catalog, the service provider or its reseller partner can set the products available to each customer, and present the customer with login-credentials. The customer can then auto-provision its own cloud services using a CRM or other front-end order system that connects to vCloud Integration Manager via the vCIM API, he said.

Management is done through a VMware Web-based GUI via a VMware console or some other console using the REST (Representational State Transfer) API.

VMware currently has 94 service provider partners in its vCloud Powered program who currently offer services through their own public clouds, as well as about 2,000 partners licensed to use vCloud Director to offer services which span multiple clouds, Lodge said.

VMware next week will hold its annual VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas.