Tech Lover 9

There is considerable concern among enterprises that by migrating some of their infrastructure or processes to the Cloud, they will experience the dreaded lock-in situation. Selecting a particular vendor cloud platform that is built on proprietary APIs and formats means that enterprises can face a lock-in situation which will make it much harder for them if they, a later stage, want to withdraw from the vendor platform, either because they want to bring the infrastructure/processes back into their premises or they want to select another vendor or service provider. This is very evident when it comes to server virtualization formats as key enablers in the context of cloud computing frameworks.

Although some public cloud providers, like Amazon AWS, originally used a open source server virtualization format to create their cloud computing platforms , have tweaked and configured the format so that in reality it has become proprietary. Amazon AWS originally used the freely available, open source Xen hypervisor format to build its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), but today uses the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is significantly different from the original Xen format, although Amazon has not disclosed the exact modifications. In fact, Amazon’s AMI is only meant for use in the EC2 cloud – enterprises cannot use it in their internal data centers.

Similarly, VMware has its Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) format and Microsoft developed the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) for running multiple instances on a single host computer. None of these are interoperable, meaning that enterprises cannot easily transfer workloads from one format to another, substantiating the lock-in fear and creating a stumbling block for cloud migration. There are vendors that help enterprises convert their existing virtual machines into e.g. AMI workloads, and vice versa, for a fee, including RightScale, Fast-Scale and Elastra.

VMware launced its vCloud Express initiative last year to make it easier for enterprises already running VMware virtualized infrastructure to extend their in-house resources to a cloud service provider that have implemented vCloud Express as a simple service platform. Already, several service providers are offering cloud services built on vCloud Express, including Terremark, RightScale and Hosting.com.

Microsoft is trying to forestall VMware’s dominance in the virtualization market by proclaiming its Hyper-V virtual machine format in the Azure cloud and by  encouraging enterprises to adopt the format in their internal data centers, thereby creating a homogeneous hybrid Windows cloud.
To address the cloud computing lock-in situation that enterprises are facing, the DTMF has issued a vendor neutral Open Virtualization Format (OVF) designed to enable cross-platform mobility of virtual machines over the network. A virtual machine based on the OFV format can be moved under VMware, Microsoft or Citrix hypervisors that understand the format. Unfortunately however, it seems that these vendors only support a one-way transfer of machine images, that is from OVF to their own proprietary formats, but not the other way around. Why are vendors reluctant to allow convert their proprietary formats back into OVF? I many ways it’s understandable as they are protecting their significant investments in developing their cloud platforms. However, it is likely that new tools or start-ups will emerge that enable conversion of the vendor formats into OVF or other familiar virtual machine formats. If cloud computing service providers start opening up their current platforms and support interoperability, we will see the fear of lock-in situations start diminishing