VMware intros cloud app market place, updates vCloud Suite tools

VMware is rolling out some major updates to its vCloud Suite infrastructure platform, most of which have to do with speeding up automation tools for cloud management.

The virtualization company already introduced some other cloud management updates for the vCloud Suite back in October at VMworld Europe in Barcelona, but today's introductions consists of the vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 and vFabric Application Director 5.0.

Version 5.6 of vCenter basically offers IT managers with a deep dive view into application monitoring while also scaling back to give group-level visibility.

The upgrade for the vFabric Director is a bit more significant. Essentially, v5.0 is supposed to ease and speed up multi-tier app deployments to any cloud infrastructure (including Amazon EC2) with a new blueprint.

Furthermore, VMware is also launching its new Cloud Applications Marketplace, an online space intended for developers, independent software vendors, system integrators, and users to collaborate and get access to a more of VMware's application management solutions.

This debut is tangential to the vFabric update as it is touted to help accelerate the aforementioned multi-tier app deployments.

At launch time, the marketplace will feature more than 100 downloadable app blueprints, reference architectures, middleware services and more for both custom or packaged applications. These features come from VMware as well as more than 30 partners ranging from independent software vendors to content providers.

VMware's vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 and vFabric Application Director 5.0 are both available now as part of the vCloud Suite, which is licensed per processor. Pricing starts at $4,995 per processor, but they are also available a la carte, priced per virtual machine.

Screenshot via VMware