OpenStack Board Member Says Adding VMware Was a Mistake 64
BButlerNWW writes "VMware is in OpenStack now, but not everyone thinks that's such a good idea. One member of the newly created OpenStack Board of Directors says allowing VMware into the open source cloud project was a 'huge mistake' that could damage the project's market perception. Boris Renski is co-founder of OpenStack integration consultancy Mirantis and he says every enterprise he's worked with so far has been interested in OpenStack because they view it as an alternative to VMware. The board's vote earlier this month has now muddled the differences, he says. 'If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?' Renski says."
Re:What is openstack? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry, I'm in the same boat too. All I've gathered is that it's The Next Big Thing (tm) and deals with The Cloud (tm). According to them anyway.
It's a Cloud Management system capable of using multiple back-ends to run the actual VMs. It manages virtual networks/disks and related resources and ties it all together.
I suppose you could look at it as the glue that takes KVM/Xen/XCP and turns it into a "cloud".
Re:What is openstack? (Score:3, Informative)
Thankfully, Google led me to a nice Stack Overflow question asking the same thing, and the first response is pretty helpful.
http://superuser.com/questions/318103/what-is-openstack-and-how-can-it-be-used [superuser.com]
"Openstack is basically a bunch of tools to setup a large-scale virtualization environment... where you can quickly create & manage virtual machines through a GUI, and keep track of what is going on. It's another framework similar to Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. There are others similar to this, like Eucalyptus and CloudStack."
Pretty much (Score:4, Informative)
We have a research group at work who is constantly chasing the next buzzword and "the cloud" is what they are after now. So they have a bigass IBM blade system they bought for researching it (well actually they bought it for researching "the cluster" but that has changed). What do they want on it? OpenStack. They can't say why, they can't say what they wish to do with it, just that they want the cloud on OpenStack.
Ok so our Linux guy sets it up for them, and wasn't all that pleased about it (he said it was more difficult than it ought to be and the documentation was wanting). They then start playing with it and can't seem to get it to do what they want. This isn't a surprise, since they don't really know what they want, but they can't make it work, and break the systems repeatedly. Finally we've had enough and give them VMWare, since to the extent they can articulate their needs it is basically "make a lot of VMs" which is something that VMWare does well, and it is easy to use.
I'm sure OpenStack has something useful it can do (ok, well reasonably sure at least) but it seems to be very buzzwordy, and often attracts people who are big on buzzwords, short on understanding.