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VMware told Wall Street analysts Wednesday that it is launching an approach to hybrid cloud computing that will enable its customers to use their VMware-based data center environments in conjunction with infrastructure-as-a-service providers in the public cloud.

In VMware's view, its virtualization management console will be the command post for both sets of workloads and will allow movement out to the cloud and back again. Before such a situation can become a reality, however, VMware must move further down the road to virtualized networks acting as an integral part of a software-defined data center.

A key building block for that, Gelsinger said in an analyst briefing Wednesday, will be the Niciria Network Virtualization Platform, an OpenFlow-based approach to networking that VMware obtained with its $1.26 billion acquisition of startup Nicira last year. Nicira NVP will become VMware NSX as it's combined with VMware's vCloud Network and Security product line. The move will get VMware out of a proprietary rut of managing primarily VMware resources and give it a neutral networking platform from which it can deal with Red Hat KVM, open source Xen and Microsoft's Hyper-V, which are starting to occupy more of the data center.

VMware's vision for the future is that when a network fits the needs of a virtual machine, it can be assigned to the VM as the VM is created. In the future data center, that network will follow the VM around as it's moved from point to point, much as storage does in the current VMware vSphere environment. Security specifications will have to move the same way.