Rackspace Hosting has announced a new offering for its Managed Virtualisation Service hosting a VMware environment, entitled ‘Dedicated VMware vCenter Server’.

This is an interesting change, given how Rackspace’s most recent focus has been on OpenStack technologies instead of VMware.

Currently, the Managed Virtualisation service offers partial accessibility to vCenter’s features, but not full management capabilities. The theory, according to Rackspace, is that the dedicated environment will be an extension of the customer’s data centre.

What does this all mean? Essentially, it’s pushing more into Rackspace’s hybrid cloud policy.

“This new service has been designed to enable customers to migrate workloads out of their data centre and into a Rackspace data centre,” said John Engates, Rackspace CTO in a statement.

“Utilising Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio gives customers the choice to find the best fit for their applications and workloads, all while offloading data centre …