In my previous blog I wrote about VMware’s involvement in open source. The proliferation of open source projects in recent years has influenced how people think about technology, and how technology is being adopted in organizations, for a few reasons. First, open source is more accessible – developers can download projects from github to their laptops and quickly start using them. Second, open source delivers cutting edge capabilities, and companies leverage that to increase the pace of innovation. Third, developers love the idea that they can influence, customize and fix the code of the tools they’re using.  Many companies are now adopting the “open source first” strategy with the hope that they will not only speed up innovation but also cut costs, as open source is free.

However, while developers increasingly adopt open source, it often doesn’t come easy to DevOps and IT teams, who carry the heavy burden of bringing applications from developer laptop to production. These teams got to think about stability, performance, security, upgrades, patching and the list goes on. In those cases, enterprises are often happy to pay for an enterprise-grade version of the product, for which all those things mentioned are already taken care of.

When applications are ready to move to production…

OpenStack is a great example. Many organizations are keen to run their applications on top of an open source platform, also known to be the industry standard. But that doesn’t come without deployment and manageability challenges. That’s where VMware provides more value to customers.

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) makes it easier for IT to deploy and run an OpenStack cloud on top of their existing VMware infrastructure. Combining VIO with the enterprise-grade capabilities of the VMware stack provides customers with the most reliable and production ready OpenStack solution. There are three key reasons for this statement: a) VMware provides best-of-breed, production ready OpenStack-compatible infrastructure; b) VIO is fully tested for both – business continuity and compatibility; and c) VMware delivers capabilities for day 2 operations. Let me go into details for each of the three.

Best-of-breed OpenStack-compatible infrastructure

First, VMware Integrated OpenStack is optimized to run on top of VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), leveraging all the enterprise-grade capabilities of VMware technologies such as high availability, scalability, security and so on.

• vSphere for Nova Compute: VIO takes advantage of vSphere capabilities such as Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) to achieve optimal VM density and vMotion to protect tenant workloads against failures.
• VMware NSX for Neutron: advanced networking services with massive scale and throughput, and with rich set of capabilities such as private networks, floating IPs, logical routing, load balancing, security groups and micro-segmentation.
• VMware vSAN/3^rd party storage for Cinder/Glance: VIO works with any vSphere-validated storage (we have the largest hardware compatibility list in the industry). VIO also brings Advanced Storage Policies through VMware vSAN.

Battle hardened and tested

OpenStack can be deployed on many combinations of storage, network, and compute hardware and software, and from multiple vendors. Testing all combinations is a challenge and often times customers who choose the DIY route will have to test their combination of hardware and software for production workloads. VMware Integrated OpenStack, on the other hand, is battle-hardened and tested against all VMware virtualization technologies to ensure the best possible user experience from deployment to management (upgrades, patching, etc.) to usage. In addition, VMware provides the broadest hardware compatibility coverage in the industry today (that has been tested in production environments).

Key capabilities for Day-2 Operations

VMware Integrated OpenStack brings operations capabilities to OpenStack users.  For example, built-in command line interface (CLI) tools enable you to troubleshoot and monitor your OpenStack deployment and the status of OpenStack services. Pre-defined workflows automate common OpenStack operations such as adding/removing capacity, configuration changes, and patching.

In addition, out-of- the-box integrations with vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and vRealize Business for Cloud provide monitoring, troubleshooting, and cost visibility for your OpenStack infrastructure.

Finally, to add to all of this, another benefit is that our customers only have one vendor and support number to call to in case of a problem. No finger pointing, no need to handle different support plans. Easy!

To learn more, visit the VIO web page and product feature walkthrough.