VMware released free upgrades to vCloud Connector for users of the virtualization company's vSphere operating system for physical data center environments and vCloud Director for managing private clouds. The release adds a search function not even in the beta release unveiled in August at VMworld. The company said version 1.5 should give customers greater confidence about moving virtual workloads from their private cloud to the public cloud.

VCloud Connector 1.5 also adds a first-ever Web browser-based management interface for finding virtual workloads, said Neha Sampat, product marketing manager at VMware, who discussed the new release in a blog post Wednesday morning.

VMware received feedback from 270 users during the beta testing period and many of them asked for a search function, said Sampat.

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"The search field was still in question back in August," she said. The feature allows an administrator to search for a virtual machine (VM) by name, select it and then work on it, copy it, or move it to or from the public cloud.

"We found that was definitely something that our customers found value in so we made sure that was supported," Sampat said.

The vCloud Connector 1.5 tool automates what had been a manual process for moving VM workloads as well as VM templates, she said. No longer does an administrator have to copy the Open Virtualization Format Virtual Machine Disk--essentially, the virtual machine image--to a temporary location before moving it to the cloud. That process is now automated.

The version update also makes a transfer smoother by breaking the task into five parts, Sampat said, so that if there's a network glitch that interrupts the transfer during, say, the third section of the transfer, the process resumes again at the beginning of the third step rather than all the way back to the beginning.

Making VM transfers smoother, quicker, and more reliable helps to overcome resistance in many quarters to moving too many VMs to a public cloud service provider, she said. Generally, companies have been cautious about moving server workloads to a public cloud out of concern about security and control over their data. Samput said the ease-of-use of vCloud Connector 1.5 allays many of those concerns.

"We've seen a lot of shift actually to moving some production workloads to a public cloud so public cloud is becoming a bit more real and people are starting to adopt it in more than just test scenarios," she said.

VCloud Connector 1.5 interoperates with about 70 VMware cloud service provider partners such as Virtacore Systems, Bluelock, iland, Colt and Terremark, the later of which was acquired by Verizon http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/229200040 in April.

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