VMware Focuses on Simplicity with Latest OpenStack Release

All the way back in 2008, I questioned whether VMware could continue to march forward with a strategy focused on proprietary virtualization technology. "Unfortunately, that red hot technology is increasingly being encroached on by open source offerings, and it is always a precarious proposition for tech companies to depend on one product category as heavily as VMware has," this post noted at the time.

Fast forward to today, and VMware is rapidly pursuing cloud computing as a driver of growth. It has just introduced VMware Integrated OpenStack 3, the latest release of VMware's OpenStack distribution now based on the OpenStack Mitaka release. VMware reports that it is "introducing new features to make deploying OpenStack clouds simpler and more cost-effective as well as allow customers to use existing VMware vSphere workloads in an API-driven OpenStack cloud." This is a smart direction for VMware to go in.

"To hasten their digital business transformation, enterprises are embracing cloud computing to help speed application development lifecycles to realize and respond to new business opportunities rapidly," VMware's announcement says.

"For customers developing on OpenStack, our mission is to make VMware Integrated OpenStack the most resource efficient and cost-effective OpenStack distribution to run in production," said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "Leveraging our experience and history of contributions to OpenStack, we've focused on streamlining deployment, operations and upgrades to help IT deliver an OpenStack cloud in a predictable fashion and time frame. The faster IT deploys the cloud, the faster developers get access to OpenStack services and APIs to build new apps and services that differentiate the business."

VMware's increased focus on OpenStack and the cloud is not new. The company has remained a top 10 overall contributor to OpenStack.

VMware Integrated OpenStack 3 includes the following:

 Improved day-to-day experience for cloud admins and IT administrators;

Simplified configuration for Nova compute service; and,

Streamlined Keystone identity service is now a one-step process for setting up the identity management features of a cloud network.

Existing VMware Integrated OpenStack customers will be able to leverage the software's built-in upgrade capability to migrate to VMware Integrated OpenStack 3.

Notably, VMware has also optimized and architected its management control plane to run full OpenStack in as few as two virtual machines. "VMware Integrated OpenStack 3 reduces the infrastructure and related costs required to power a production-ready OpenStack cloud that can scale to thousands of virtual machines, volumes and networks," the company claims.

This new OpenStack release from VMware follows Red Hat's release by only a matter of days. We covered Red Hat's updates here.