VMWare and F5 Announce Collaboration for Cloud Live Application Mobility

During the Vmworld 2009 convention, F5 Networks will be holding a demonstration on how to use VMWare products to perform a secure migration of several virtualized applications with their associated storage to and from a cloud system. According to F5's press release, this will be done with no application downtime or any kind of user disruption.

"Enterprises and service providers are increasingly building their cloud infrastructures on the VMware vSphere 4 virtualization platform," said Shekar Ayyar, VP of Infrastructure Alliances at VMware. "This solution from F5 demonstrates the combined ability of VMware and F5 products to provide seamless, automated connectivity to the cloud today. This joint solution extends the power of virtualization to VMware vSphere 4 instances in the cloud and illustrates a clear path to realizing the promise of unfettered computing mobility for production applications leading to most efficient use of available resources."

This collaboration will be using products from F5 like BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager to simplify global traffic management for later cloud live migrations. F5 will also be using VMWare's vCenter Server, vCenter API, Storage Vmotion, Vmotion and vSphere 4 to “overcome many networking hurdles” when migrating live applications to a cloud system.

These demonstrations, if successful, will reduce the complexity of rerouting global traffic manually or having to kill live applications to reroute traffic. Using this technique, system administrators will not have to clone or suspend deployed applications for cloud usage.

"This joint solution with VMware enables access to cloud resources without manual intervention from IT,” said Erik Giesa, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing for the F5 Networks.

At the same time, some reports from ReadWriteWeb talk about a collaboration between Zoho and VMWare of being in the works. According to them, companies will be using VMWare's vSphere product to run Zoho applications on private clouds behind a firewall, but still benefiting from the public cloud's properties.