You may have heard a few terms thrown around in the news lately. Terms like “vBlock” and VCE. So what do these mean and why should you care about them? I’ll answer both.

VCE = the VMware, Cisco, EMC (VCE) Coalition is a partnership between these 3 companies to work together to promote and accelerate the movement to cloud computing and fully virtualized environments.The VCE acronym has also been interpreted as “virtualization changes everything”. The vBlock is the building block offered by VCE to help companies make this move to virtualization easier and faster (discussed below). You should care about VCE because, with the resources they are devoting to this, their solutions may be in your datacenter just around the corner.

vBlock - EMC defined the vBlock as “a pre-architected and pre-qualified environment for virtualization at scale: storage, fabric, compute, hypervisor, management and security.” I think of it more as a “datacenter in a box” with all the pieces being from VMware, Cisco, and EMC. The vBlock is shipped to you and all ready to virtualize your infrastructure. Here is what it might look like:

And, here is a video about vBlocks…