VMware Studio 2.0 Beta launch

VMware Studio 2.0 Beta was made publicly available just a few days ago. Note that the name of this product is not yet vStudio!

New features of Studio 2.0 are:

• Build vApps and virtual appliances (with in-guest OS and application components) compatible with VMware Infrastructure, VMware vSphere 4.0 and the cloud
• Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9
• Available as an Eclipse plugin in addition to the standalone version
• Ability to accept existing, Studio-created VM builds as input
• Support for 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows 2003 and 2008 Server, SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 and 5.3, CentOS 5.2 and 5.3, Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 and additional operating systems
• Publish patches to update deployed virtual appliances
• Extensible in-guest management framework
• Automatic Dependency resolution
• VMware ESX Server, VMware ESXi, VMware Server 2.0, Server 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6, VMware Workstation enabled as provisioning engines
• Infrastructure enhancements in the GUI and builds

Vendor lock-in, severity across cloud architectures

Several people have asked me in the recent past about the vendor-lock-in issue with various deployment architectures. The below picture should be self-explanatory on the amount of lock-in across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. The lock-in that I am referring-to here is a combined aggregate of Vendor lock-in + data lock-in + dev environment lock-in + data lock-in.