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OpenStack Board Member Says Adding VMware Was a Mistake
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."
It's comical and a bit sad to think that the board fell for it. The very act of VMware signing up and sitting there to play devils advocate is causing confusion for potential customers. Either way, VMware wins.
'If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?' Renski says."
A: A tool.
IT professionals, well, experienced ones anyway, don't care what the name is on the tin, as long as it does what it says on the tin. If it does its job well, it will succeed. If it does not, well... there are alternatives.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What is openstack? Other than something with a board of directors, that per the front page is "simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich". Thats great, so is EMACS and apache and linux.
I clicked around and it uses git and the install instructions show it fdisks something, presumably my hard drive (whoa there nellie) and uses mysql as a backend and whatever keystone and glance and nova and horizon might be, their installation is pretty easy. But what is openstack? Basically a linux distro that installs that stuff, or ... ?
Note that I'm no noob... its just that I can't figure out what openstack is. I've done tons of NFS/AFS/Samba over the decades and some virtualization stuff with vmware and I have a little 4 node 20-30 LXC image "cluster" at home. LXC because its simple and the hardware is ancient aka free so I can't do "fancy" hardware virtualization.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why does 'open' in IT always turn into a big Us v. Them dick measuring contest rather than serving end users?
Open except for XYZ... Does anyone else see the pattern?
Anybody remember OS/2 and how Windows compatibility killed the native OS/2 application market because it was so good? They can use the same mechanism here: "Always choose OpenStack. Where VMWare is the best solution, you can arrive at that solution through OpenStack. Going directly with VMWare limits your options if it turns out it's not the best solution".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
How do I buy a license to try OpenStack? Do I get it through my normal VMWare channel or is there another purchase and licensing mechanism I need to follow?
I get a feeling the OpenStack folks somehow hope to bring all competing vendors under the same umbrella and it'll all be ponies and rainbows all the way to cloud nirvana.
I'm afraid one that tries to pleases everybody, turns into an ugly mess.
none
Err, I was hoping you would tell us, since the openstack web page doesn't say a god damned thing, or give anyone the slightest hint what openstack might be.
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.
When I buy a tool, I demand that it only works with other stuff from the same vendor.
It would just be too confusing if I could use the same adjustable wrench for different brands of bolts.
plain and simple mistake. They will try to sabotage, derail, acquire, etc.
What is openstack?
OpenStack is a Linux distribution for running (as opposed to using) a "cloud service." A typical cloud service lets users create and run virtual machines, use storage, message queues, job schedulers, network bandwidth and other stuff across a large collection of redundant hardware. Users are billed for the use of services (CPU, storage, bandwidth, etc.)
VMWare licenses proprietary products that do the same job. One can be certain VMWare does not wish to have its fabulously lucrative business model commoditized by OpenStack. The supposed controversy is that VMWare is now on the board of the OpenStack Foundation.
If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?
It's a software property owned by the community, what's wrong with that?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
'If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?'
It's an alternative to VMware with an easy migration path.
This isn't difficult ... is it?
OpenNebula. We have a large install base where I work, it does a fine job. It's essentially a lightweight management layer over libvirt and KVM for us, although it works with other hypervisors as well.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
From what I can gather, this "cloud" soup du jour from Marketing(TM) is a collection of scripts that raps up virtual machines to run in a cluster\server setting and expose an API of sorts so programmers can now write to it regardless of the hardware actually running... That is, taking the Knuth approach, if an OS is a virtual machine to the hardware, this OpenStack is the VM to the cluster? Is this what they call a "cloud"?
So, OpenStack leverages both file storage and co-computing, much in the same way VmWare products \ services do. As the story goes, at one point VmWare realized the OpenStack API might become is becoming the industry standard so they joined this organization to either ruin it from within or make sure they have a say in things. Now, the OpenStack chiefs realised they made such a poor job of explaining people what is OpenStack that their "clients\customers\users" (I gather it's a collaboration open source project co-funded by all sort of companies) that they don't understand what VmWare is doing there. Their "clients\customers\users" were choosing the free OpenStack as an alternative to the closed VmWare, and now they feel like when the linux users first heard about linux getting code from the Microsoft team (MS's virtualization module ironically).
Did I get it right? Do I get a cookie?
"If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it? "
OpenStack is basically an operating system for large clusters. It exposes it's system api's as REST interfaces you can call over http.
It's components are:
Nova: handles compute resources, such as VM's (work is underway to handle bare-metal provisioning, too), These can be provided by many hypervisors, such as XenServer, KVM, HyperV and VMWare, or containers like LXC. Nova handles resource allocation across the cluster of hosts. When you ask for a VM/container of a certain compute capacity, it finds a host with available resources and sets up a VM. Think of it like Linux's process scheduler and process management functions.
Glance: handles metadata about VM images, and acts as a 'pump' to schlep images to/from storage.
Swift: object store. Someone likened it to a key/value store. Similar, but it is designed to handle large data values (whole files, including multi GB server images) in a fault tolerant fashion. (it replicates your data 3 times on separate hardware in the cluster.) ala S3.
Keystone: identity management. Handles user authentication, multi-user accounts, and information on what users can do. Think PAM/kerberos.
Cinder: Block storage. Handles allocating block (ie iSCSI) devices you can mount filesystems on.
Quantum: Handles virtualized networks between VM's. Basically sets up private tunnels between VM's
Plus web admin gui's for above (Horizon), and all of the admin tools for the operators of the cluster(s) to check who's using what, etc.
Basically, if you you need, say, 3 webheads running CentOS with 2gb of ram, a DB server with 16gb and an attached 500gb storage array, a Windows server, and a private network between those, Openstack is what lets you make a REST call (or click a few buttons in a web gui that then makes the call) and, if you have authorization to request that, and resources are available, it will give you that.
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne