SAN FRANCISCO -- VMware is reshuffling its cloud computing cards with a plan to split intellectual property currently in vCloud Director into new integrations with vCenter and vCloud Automation Center, the company said this week.

Exact details on which features of vCloud Director (vCD) will go into which part of VMware Inc.'s vCloud Suite are not available yet, but it's a safe bet capabilities like multi-tenancy management would be pushed into vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), while constructs like the Virtual Data Center would fall into vCenter, said Mike Adams, a VMware spokesperson.

Customers with existing vCD deployments will have options for licensing as well as technical upgrades. How the licensing convergence will work depends on how they acquired vCD in the first place -- as a standalone product or as part of the vCloud Suite, Adams said.

Standalone customers will be moved into the vCloud Suite, which now includes vCAC, and purchasers of the vCloud Suite must shift to using vCAC instead of vCD.

A migration tool will also be forthcoming to assist with the conversion from vCD to vCAC, Adams said.

"Sometimes in the past we haven't done a great job on migration stories, and this one is one we really need to get right, so we're doing a lot of due diligence to make sure we get it absolutely correct," Adams said.

While some customers are sure to be inconvenienced by these moves, others see VMware approaching the cloud space with a renewed focus.

That said, current customers of vCloud Automation Center who discussed the changes during VMworld in San Francisco this week fear a painful conversion process, citing a difficult conversion between versions 5.1 and 5.2 of the vCloud Suite already.

"There better be a pretty seamless path to implement whatever version is coming out without causing us to have to rework everything," said Kirk Bellmore, VMware systems engineer for a higher education institution in San Diego. "vCloud Director does not have a history of being one of those tools that's easy to either implement or upgrade."

But vCAC, which is based on intellectual property (IP) acquired with DynamicOps last summer, is clearly the superior product, analysts at VMworld said.