Canonical and VMware collaborate to enable OpenStack clouds with VMware technologies
Companies work to enable customers to confidently use OpenStack with VMware’s Enterprise-Grade virtualization technologies
Canonical and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a collaboration that will enable organisations to deploy VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere® and Nicira NVP, with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure, the most widely used OpenStack distribution, will now include the plugins required to use OpenStack with vSphere and NVP. Canonical will provide commercial support for OpenStack and will collaborate with VMware on issues related to vSphere or NVP running with OpenStack. In addition, VMware reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system (OS) on vSphere. This agreement will enable customers the flexibility to deploy and reliably run OpenStack clouds with Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure on VMware vSphere while receiving commercial support.
“By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere support in OpenStack, and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we’re delivering customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in OpenStack clouds,” Joshua Goodman, vice president, Product Management, vSphere, VMware. “Canonical’s Ubuntu technology is widely used by those deploying OpenStack, and joint customers will be able leverage the familiar and proven capabilities of the vSphere infrastructure in which they’ve already invested.”
As part of the OpenStack “Grizzly” release on April 4, 2013, VMware contributed code to add vSphere support to the OpenStack Compute project (codenamed “Nova”). These contributions were built on VMware’s existing leadership in the OpenStack Networking project (codenamed “Quantum”), which focused on Nicira NVP. Canonical and VMware will collaborate on software testing, deployment automation, customer support and reference designs. Additionally, VMware’s continued support of Ubuntu as a guest OS on vSphere enables customers to run production workloads at the highest virtual machine densities on the world’s most battle-tested hypervisor platform.
“Customers in both enterprise and carrier markets are eager to deploy OpenStack in conjunction with their existing VMware vSphere® infrastructure,” said Chris Kenyon, senior vice president, Sales and Business Development, Canonical. “This joint offering will be a fully supported and certified solution for OpenStack cloud infrastructure that uses VMware hypervisors for compute, combining existing vSphere real estate with Ubuntu’s category-leading OpenStack distribution.’