VMware announces vCloud Express

Today at the Keynote at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco VMware announced VMware vCloud Express. The VMware vCloud Express is part of or if you want a product or spin off from the vCloud initiative that was presented at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

vCloud Express is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering delivered by leading VMware service provider partners. It provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services.

So who delivers and what do you get?

The following snap from a slide somewhat covers that question:

A screenshot from the newly launched vCloud Express website (Beta) of Terremark :

(click on the picture to go to the website)

The pricing is very clear and is on a pay-per-use basis. In the pricing model Terremark differentiates into a couple of areas:

• Servers – The hourly price of the servers depends on their deployed virtual processors (VPUs), memory and system storage configuration.
• System Storage /Gb /month
• Additional Storage /Gb /month
• Public IP /hour /IP – you can activate public IP addresses that stay persistent with your environment until you no longer need them
• Internet Service /hour /service – Internet Services allow you to configure a public IP address’s Internet protocol and communication port so your servers can be reached from the Internet. With the Internet Services feature you also can enable network load balancing across multiple servers.
• bandwidth /transferred GB – Internet bandwidth is billed based on data transferred in and out of your vCloud Express public IP addresses
• Subscription software / month /software license – Pre-build templates with an OS like Windows Server 2003 can be used.