THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:
- -a new storage platform (like ceph or gluster, which we know nothing about, obviously)
- -a new backup platform (equivalent of veeam?)
- -most likely a separated switching (going 10G)
- -and probably duplicate a lot more things that are on VMware currently
Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?