Open Source continues to be an important part of the mix in Virtualization and Cloud. Indeed, this year has seen major developments in established players at the Operating System and Hypervisor level, as well as a major new cloud entry at the IaaS cloud layer.
TVP Tag Archives
OpenStack on Hyper-V – Microsoft does Public Cloud Interoperability
On October 22nd, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project. The announcement caused a great deal of interest here at the Virtualization Practice, as it signals an unexpected willingness on Microsoft’s part to pursue interoperability at the IaaS layer, allowing users to break out of the Hyper-v stack, whilst still retaining Hyper-v at the bottom. The fact this announcement came from Microsoft (not Cloud.com, Rackspace or OpenStack) seems to signal the seriousness of the intent.
Ubuntu edging towards OpenStack
Eucalyptus-based solution that is bundled into the Ubuntu installation from 9.10 onwards and allows you to install a IaaS cloud into which you subsequently install Ubuntu Server instances, rather than directly installing an Ubuntu Server. The Eucalyptus proposition is that the cloud you create is identical from an API – and therefore a tooling – perspective to an Amazon EC2 cloud, and the same Ubuntu instances can run inside it, and even can be cloud-bursted out to it. Canonical make a lot of this duality in their positioning of Eucalyptus and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It feels very-much like an “onramp” message that we hear from VMware.
Rackspace Hijacks OpenStack
Rackspace has got the OpenStack governance model spectacularly wrong, and as a result the whole initiative is in peril. Not only are the Chair and the Chief Architect appointed directly by Rackspace, but 3 additional members are appointed directly by Rackspace, meaning that the 4 independently-elected Community members (even if they could agree) could never form a majority. There is actually no need to gain control explicitly. You control by contribution. Since Rackspace contributes most it will gain most control. Rackspace doesn’t actually need control to satisfy its business objectives. ll it needs is to make sure the project is successful and retain enough control over the project to ensure its own needs are met. So our suggestion to OpenStack is to take their Governance model, rip it up and start again.
Why Cloud.com is NOT a drowning turkey
We recently annoyed Peder Ulander of Cloud.com by suggesting when Cloud.com joined OpenStack it was a Turkey waiting for Thanksgiving. We spoke, here’s what we said about Cloud computing, OpenStack, Licensing, Eclipse, innovation, billing and a stack of other things.
VMworld from an Open Source Perspective
VMworld is clearly the largest dedicated virtualization conference, and yet from an Open Source perspective it is slightly disappointing because the VMware ecosystem naturally attracts proprietary software vendors, and also some of the more interesting activities in Open Source are through multi-vendor foundations which do not have the same marketing budgets as vendors themselves.
Nevertheless, there are a number of key Open Source players, and some interesting smaller players, represented at VMworld.