Microsoft announced it had partnered with Cloud.com to support Hyper-V with OpenStack in October 2010. This was not long after the land-rush of companies clamoring to announce their support for OpenStack in the wake of its unveiling at OSCON 2010. It appears, though, that the folks in Redmond have lost interest in giving its customers support for using Windows Server Hyper-V to deploy OpenStack.
On Friday, January 27th, OpenStack’s Thierry Carrez sent a note to the developer list to remove “deprecated, known-buggy-and-unmaintained or useless feature code” from the Essex release.
One of the features Carrez would like to drop? Hyper-V, which Carrez says is “known broken and unmaintained.” I contacted one member of the OpenStack community who had been involved in Hyper-V support and was told the code for Hyper-V had not been touched since April 2011.
Ken Pepple gave a +1 in favor of dropping Hyper-V support. According to Pepple, “Hyper-V support is missing support for even the most basic functions – volumes, glance, several network managers, etc. We investigated it for our service, but found it only borderline functional.”
Whither Windows?
This raises the question of running Windows guests on top of OpenStack, particularly for shops that want support from Microsoft if they run into problems.
Ewan Mellor says that “if you want Microsoft to take a phone call, then you need a hypervisor with the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certificate.” This means Citrix XenServer, Red Hat’s RHEV (KVM), Oracle VM, Novell’s SLES (Xen) or VMware ESX. Of those options OpenStack should work with a KVM or Xen-based hypervisor or VMware ESX/ESXi.
So companies will have no problem finding a hypervisor that will support running Windows guests on OpenStack. But they may wind up paying more for support for one of the platforms that Microsoft supports when they have perfectly good entitlements to use Hyper-V on Windows Server.
Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix in July 2011, which might explain why Hyper-V support fell by the wayside.
In the interim, Microsoft has announced support for OpenNebula with Hyper-V. According to the OpenNebula blog a development version of its Hyper-V driver was released in October.
The Essex release of OpenStack is scheduled for March. Many of the OpenStack folks will be meeting at FOSDEM next weekend and I’ll be sure to catch up with some of them to see what else is happening in the Essex and “F” release (and beyond) of OpenStack.
Any readers that were planning on trying OpenStack with Hyper-V? Is this going to impact any deployments or tests of OpenStack?
