DynamicOps offers technology that enables IT admins to provision and manage IT services across heterogeneous environments, including VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services. The acquisition is scheduled to close in the third quarter.

"As IT organizations evolve from builders to brokers of services, many seek to provide access to diverse cloud resources in a controlled, managed fashion," said Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Cloud Management, VMware. "DynamicOps' multi-cloud and multi-platform capabilities help to strengthen VMware's position as the infrastructure and management vendor of choice for cloud computing."

How It Fits Together

With the DynamicOps acquisition, VMware is betting that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture , but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management. Customers that have standardized their private and public clouds on VMware vSphere can continue to work with VMware vCloud Director to aggregate and manage virtual and cloud resources.

For customers whose requirements for managing and provisioning resources extend beyond VMware-only environments, VMware said DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by letting customers to consume multi-cloud resources, such as physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2 .

DynamicOps' policy-based service governor capabilities automate and control how applications and users are provisioned across physical and heterogeneous cloud infrastructure resources.

Management Middleware

We turned to Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his take on the latest in a string of acquisitions this week. He told us he had been wondering when VMware would make this type of move.

"There's a battle going on for the manageability of the data center. In fact, I think he who owns the management layer will probably end up owning the data center wars," Kerravala said. "It almost seems like the hypervisor now has almost become a commodity. vCenter is a great management tool for VMware, but data centers are made up of more than VMware today. This gives them Oracle and Citrix management capabilities as well."

Kerravala said VMware could become almost like management middleware, fitting between the hypervisor and the applications. In other words, VMware could wind up being the software control for no matter who's virtual infrastructure is in the data center.

"In many ways, even if a customer winds up going to someone else's hypervisor," he said, "VMware provides more value because of that management layer."