The love-hate entanglements between VMware and OpenStack

Compared with other technology vendors, VMware is probably the most willing vendor in the world to help enterprise users migrate their existing infrastructure to a more agile and efficient virtualization server. In short, VMware is a technology giant that has been widely successful in the domain of enterprise virtualization servers.

When it comes to cloud computing, however, VMware's dominance is less robust and, to say, not even established. Amazon is now a well-deserved overlord, and VMware alone in the OpenStack is not enough to belittlin the warlords. OpenStack as an open source project has many stakeholders, the participating enterprises to contribute their own strength to work together to create a set of open cloud Platform solutions.

About the love-hate tangle between VMware and OpenStack in the past few years, I've found that VMware's OpenStack development position on different occasions seems to be vastly different. In some media interviews, VMware has always emerged as an open-source OpenStack challenger. In this week's interview, VMware CEO said OpenStack is not suitable for corporate users. But to explore the truth, we need to analyze it more deeply.

Like VMware, OpenStack represents more than just a separate product or thing. It represents a series of project collections, which are collectively referred to as OpenStack, including computing, storage, networking, business processes, and authentication services. Similarly, VMware has its own tool family, including vsphere (and its accompanying ESX management program), Vcenter, and vcloud management tools suite. Although Vcloud is often considered a OpenStack competition scheme, vsphere ESX is not in conflict with the latter.

But the difference with VMware is that openstack the abstraction layer as the primary focus. Its efforts are directed towards building a high-level functional platform while allowing products and services from other vendors to be plugged in. For example, in the OpenStack Nova Computing project, users were able to choose VMware ESX as Virtualization management programs.

Yes, VMware can (and does) function within the OpenStack.

As early as the OpenStack San Diego Summit in October 2012, I listened in awe to Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, explaining how the company met OpenStack in a limited way. Herrod did not do a single product show on the day; from his standpoint, he improvised an impromptu answer to the question from the audience (many of which may be the question). Herrod says the future world will be mixed, and he admits that many users do not want to be confined to the pure VMware stack.

VMware has now incorporated the strategy into the implementation process. At the end of last July's VMware 2013 second quarter earnings conference call, company CEO Pat Gelsinger a very positive outlook for VMware's development prospects in the OpenStack world.

"VMware's goal is to develop into a leader in the cloud infrastructure software market, and we have clearly expressed our position in support of OpenStack through a number of statements," Gelsinger points out. "We call it our own component strategy, which is to actively embrace the OpenStack API and add it to our products, eventually extending our industry's best generic technology to the OpenStack framework." ”

VMware is also the OpenStack Network project (once known as ' Quantum ' and has now been renamed ' Neutron ') as the main support manufacturer and catalyst. The power of development within VMware stems from the acquisition of Nicira (the deal took place in 2012 and VMware paid 1.26 billion dollars for it). The OpenStack network (like other OpenStack projects) is also an abstraction layer, and the VMware Micira Network virtualization platform (which is sure to usher in a new round of upgrades at the VMworld conference a week later) is one of the key technologies involved.

For now, OpenStack has achieved remarkable success and will continue to be a successful gesture for the foreseeable future. This is mainly because it is flexible enough to be any tool in the hands of any user. It is an open platform, with outstanding scalability that has won the participation of a large number of vendors to build up a huge ecosystem-even those widely regarded as rivals, such as VMware, will be able to join.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)