This article is more than 1 year old

VMware doubling down on OpenStack

Second Virtzilla distribution is on the way and it looks like telcos are the target

The content catalog for late August's VMworld San Francisco has yielded up another nuggetoid of vNews: a new version of VMware Integrated OpenStack.

Virtzilla debuted its own OpenStack distribution last year, billing it as an exceptionally fine distribution for those who want to run an OpenStack cloud on top of vSphere. OpenStack has happily managed VMware's ESX hypervisor for a few years, so by making its own distribution VMware gave itself the best chance to help meld OpenStack and vSphere nicely. VMware also has plenty to gain by making sure there's a distribution out there that plays nice with its products, if only because it gives those who want to use OpenStack an easy way to keep using (and paying for) vSphere too.

At the time of writing, VMware's distribution is at version 1.02, hence our interesting in this newly-posted Vmworld session titled What’s New in VMware Integrated OpenStack version 2.0!. The session description is scanty: all we have to go on is that this new distribution is based on Kilo (aka version 11, which arrived in May 2015) and “will include Ceilometer and other features that are important to OpenStack consumers and operators.”

Ceilometer's Project Mission is to “reliably collect measurements of the utilization of the physical and virtual resources comprising deployed clouds, persist these data for subsequent retrieval and analysis, and trigger actions when defined criteria are met.” The project's also described as aiming … to deliver a unique point of contact for billing systems to acquire all of the measurements they need to establish customer billing, across all current OpenStack core components with work underway to support future OpenStack components.”

VMware's made no secret of its ambition in network function virtualisation (NFV), creating a team to promote the concept and launching vCloud for NFV earlier this year in order to bring OpenStack to telcos.

At a guess, The Reg's virtualisation disk thinks VMware probably knows telcos won't want ESX or ESXi powering every VM they deploy as they roll out more NFV. But if VMware Integrated OpenStack suits telcos' needs, and features good billing features thanks to Ceilometer, Virtzilla can keep the crown jewels of the core data centre and let OpenStack have the rest of a telco's sprawling infrastructure. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like