This is (unsurprisingly) really raising the bar. FWIW I'm not one of the people who's seen the API so it's interesting to see they too went for OVF over a REST based API... it seems that OVF is in fact at the heart of this protocol (or is it vice versa?). That may or may not be a good thing.

Object model looks like this (courtesy pp59):

Organisation

Virtual Data Center (VDC)

vApp (multiple VMs, "internal" network, n-tier app in a box)

Other observations:

Flexible networking (like ours) - multiple tagged networks ("foo", "bar", "VDCnet", "Public", "Private")
Persistent VMs (we want to allow for both)
SLA on vApp (to be implemented as an extension)
Overprovisioning (interesting area, from user PoV means hiding size of storage pools, etc. which most providers will want to do anyway)
Both serialization and configuration via OVF
Talk about scaling to 10k hosts and 100k VMs
"HTTP based resource oriented interface" (just like OCCI!)
"All the characteristics of the WWW
• Extensible without breaking client. (like OCCI)
• Client only has to know about what it cares about. (like OCCI)
• Can route, proxy, cache <- interesting, useful, can be difficult to achieve
Interestingly uses Spring Framework

Injects dependencies and wires together Spring beans
Forces programmer into maintainable design pattern; isolates dependencies

OSGI: Standard dynamic module framework (Global registry of interfaces to instances - Dynamically load, unload, start, stop bundle)... not sure how interesting this is really
JMS publish/subscribe messaging bus isolates end points (message buses will be a key component of most successful cloud architectures IMO - something to consider when we're talking about formatting)
Hibernate simplifies DB code & DB independence

The actual VMware architecture (pp76) I found less interesting because it varies from provider to provider and is the detail that the cloud conceals from end users.

Sam

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Alexis Richardson <alexis.richardson@gmail.com> wrote:

Wes,

Thanks for that.

Some of us have seen vCloud APIs under NDA. There is definitely
overlap with OCCI. VMware are aware of OCCI and I personally hope we
see them contribute at some stage.

alexis

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:06 PM, Wes Felter <wesley@felter.org> wrote:
> VMware has revealed few technical details about vCloud, but I found this
> public presentation containing some interesting diagrams starting on
> pages 50 and 76. Overall, the concepts appear similar to the work going
> on in OCCI.
>
> http://forum.stanford.edu/events/2009Plenary/Orran%20Kriegar.pdf
>
> The bullets "Researchers can replace any part of the service." and
> "Researchers can replace the entire implementation
> and clone the API" also caught my eye.
>
> Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org
> _______________________________________________
> occi-wg mailing list
> occi-wg@ogf.org
> http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/occi-wg
>
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