The talk about OpenStack’s openness should not cloud out what is really happening. And that’s the fact that there is a whole lot of innovation coming from this growing group of engineers and developers.
Simon Crosby of Citrix puts this in perspective today in a post about OpenStack’s support for vSphere that Citrix played a large part in helping make happen.
The vSphere support now brings to seven the total OpenStack compute options available: vSphere, XenServer/Xen Cloud Platform, Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, QEMU, and UML.
Why did Citrix, a huge VMware foe, decide to embark upon the effort to support the VMware hypervisor in the OpenStack community? Crosby puts it this way:
We in the OpenStack community believe that you ought to have a choice. We don’t think you need to throw out ESX or even vSphere. You made a rational decision to use (err, buy) it. But you ought to have a choice as to whether your cloud implementation will lock you into a single vendor model forever, with a limited set of expensive value-added services. We think there’s another way, that permits innovation in cloud services and solutions, that scales massively, and that is wholly free. The answer is OpenStack Compute – a massively scalable cloud orchestration system developed by over 50 vendors, hundreds of engineers and put in production by the world’s largest cloud service providers.
Wardey is one of the better bloggers out in the cloud world. He pulls no punches. But his points are quite valid.
OpenStack is innovating, showing its importance as an organization. Adding vSphere opens up the possibilities for customers.
And that’s a good thing.
