Virtualization solutions market leader VMware unveiled on Tuesday a new family of products meant to enable companies to provide compute resources as a service. Several of the vendor's partners also announced their intent to act as providers of such cloud-based services. The said announcements were made at VMware-organized VMworld 2009 conference in San Francisco.

VMware vCloud Express (the new product family) is based on vSphere, the company's well known virtualization platform. Service providers such as Terremark and Hosting.com will leverage vCloud Express to provide services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud-based resources deployed will be compatible with clients' existing VMware environments and will come with service-level guarantees.

Managed service providers join in
vCloud provided by Terremark will be compatible with the company's existing private cloud offering called Enterprise Cloud. Customers will be able to provision virtual infrastructure through a Web-based interface. They will be able to ensure interoperability between their internal and external clouds by using vCloud API to access their environments.

"vCloud Express delivers control directly to customers," said Craig McLellan, CTO of Hosting.com, which has also began offering vCloud Express services. "They can setup new accounts, adjust virtual machine resources, turn additional machines on or off and deploy and execute virtual machine commands with no human interaction - if so desired."

Both Terremark and Hosting.com said they began providing vCloud Express in its beta version on Tuesday.

Colocation and managed service provider Savvis announced on Tuesday a plan to launch a new private cloud offering based on VMware's vSphere 4 platform. The company expects the beta version of the Virtual Private Data Center to be live later this year.

SpringSource to help smooth cloud integration
One of the companies helping VMware along in developing its vCloud solutions is software platform developer SpringSource. VMware is in the middle of buying the company after entering into an acquisition agreement earlier this month.

SpringSource "will be taking their tools, their layers and putting (them) on top of the vCloud infrastructure to open up the possibility to make it very easy to develop and deploy applications for both the internal and the external clouds," VMware CEO Paul Maritz said in a press conference.

SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson (left) and RightScale CEO Michael Crandell. On Tuesday RightScale announced the extension of its cloud management platform to support for the vCloud API and for vCloud Express service providers.

Enabling seamless integration from the legacy data center to the internal cloud and to the external cloud was a key issue the merger between SpringSource and VMware addressed, said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson. "It's a logical extension of our build-run-manage strategy to address not just the traditional data center and the needs of the developer base, but to cater for those needs going forward into cloud infrastructure and doing so in a very seamless manner," he said.

Buying SpringSource for about $362 million was VMware's largest M&A transaction to date.