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."

Comments

Devils Advocate

[kylegordon]

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.

Re:Devils Advocate

[wermske]

Clearly, you've been sleeping with VMWare. That's one vote.

Answer

[girlintraining]

'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.

Re:Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's over-simplified. Are you familiar with the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for going with [large vendor]?"

Re:Answer

[rathaven]

That's always assuming that they give it a chance in the first place. Small vendor/open source vs Safe Big Vendor - easy to see where the IT Managers who buy into the big names are safe/good products are going to put their money.

Re:Answer

[LordLimecat]

Perhaps instead of "experienced IT professionals" he should have said "competent IT professionals".

Re:Answer

[jmcvetta]

And then one party looks like they're working their arses off to get stuff done, and the other guy looks like he sits around all day reading /.

I used to work with a guy who spent a good part of his day literally asleep at his workstation. However, at any time he could be woken up, and with wizard-like acuity fix the problems that were his to fix. The bossman was well aware of his slumber habits. Yet he was considered a very valuable member of the team, by his coworkers and management alike.

YMMV.

What is openstack?

[vlm]

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.

Re:What is openstack?

[Pinhedd]

I couldn't possibly agree more. I hate when I get directed to a project website and get bombarded with page after page of non-statements that say absolutely nothing about the project. The first two things I want to know are "what is it?" and "why should I care?". Save the marketing drivel.

Re:What is openstack?

[Xacid]

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.

Re:What is openstack?

[msk]

You, too, can get rich with this product! I'll tell you how for only $9.99.

Re:What is openstack?

[atriusofbricia]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"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."

Re:What is openstack?

[vlm]

Manage it with their software and service client requests for things like VM's to run app servers/applications/databases etc. It handles the disk sharing, memory and processor allocation and allows you to oversubscribe your system.

That's pretty close. I'd correct that because the underlying software is what does this. I do this on a small scale with homemade shell and puppet scripts. Openstack is basically a web gui on top of the underlying software that does what my scripts do.

In fact I'd make an excellent analogy to CPANEL for webhosting. CPANEL does not fling bits out port 80, but it does / did give you a web GUI to mess with the apache config, basically.

I feel after an investment of only 15 minutes I finally figured out what openstack "is". Not sure if thats good or bad. Bad I guess.

Re:What is openstack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your explanation is in the right direction but there's an essential part missing. What makes Openstack a cloud platform? It's a cloud because it can run cloud applications. These are ~ new type of applications that are aware they're running in a cloud. Just like classic enterprise apps deployed in an app server, cloud applications are coded against an API, provided by Openstack. The API is designed so that the app can benefit from various services, like structured data storage, but it's also designed to enforce apps that can scale well, with little changes, to very large number of servers. Current apps can't do that in a cost effective manner and that's why a cloud of applications is something that is very valuable for someone looking to build things like the next Youtube, GMail or Dropbox but without Google's unlimited money and human resources supply.

All that the current VMware toolchain can provide is a cloud of virtual machines. You would be hard pressed to find a whole datacenter running on VMware while also running a single application in all the virtual machines.

Amongst almost all the other cloud platforms currently on the rise, Openstack is a darling because it promises to have an open API for those cloud apps. This is of tremendous importance to avoid the mother of all vendor lockins. Currently you can't have an app built for one cloud platform and then move it to another cloud. If you build an app for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform you know you won't be able to move it to Google's App Engine or Amazon's Elastic Cloud without running the huge risk of trying to rewrite the app. With an app running on Openstack, you could run it on your own servers for a while and then move it to some Openstack cloud provider. And if you are not happy with that provider after a while, you can switch to another one, etc.

Re:What is openstack?

[postbigbang]

The web page sucks. The tools, however, are reasonably powerful VM stack controllers that use stuff you probably know, like REST, XML, and communications like marionette and puppet, etc etc. You bring up lots of stuff, make it do work, cough the results into storage, rinse, repeat.

If you're a developer of systems-grade apps, OpenStack saves you steps, talks to lots of providers (especially AWS and Rackspace) and you get a lot of work done. Don't be superficial and look at the website. Dive deeper and try it; it's profoundly simple if you're a modern systems coder with a little time to learn. Best background: learn Ruby, Rails, heavy scripting language, and the principles of VMs. Mix, pour.

Re:What is openstack?

[Zadaz]

I feel after an investment of only 15 minutes I finally figured out what openstack "is".

"Only"? If it takes a knowledgable person 15 minutes to figure out, in the most basic terms, what a product is then that product has a serious problem. It might just be a marketing problem, but it might be simply a useless product.

Condensing your description to three words: ("CPANEL for VMs") is incredibly helpful. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it gets me far enough that I can evaluate if I need to know more or not. Which is completely different from the buzzword full, fact free website that is OpenStack.org.

Sadly I'm betting the people running OpenStack.org are seeing a huge number of hits on their site today and thinking "Sweet! look at all the interest!" when it's really just a bunch of smart people trying to figure out what the hell they're talking about.

They can spin it the other way

[Bogtha]

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".

How to get a license?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Unrealistic expectations?

[gtirloni]

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.

Pretty much

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Pretty much

[lgw]

I've used VMwares "turn some VMs into a cloud" solution, at least to provision and manage sets of VMs, and while it's primary goal in life is clearly to convince people "this is the cloud!" it is a nice simple, well documented REST API.

If OpenStack doesn't have a similar simple, modern, well documented API for managing swarms of VMs I'm not sure what it has going for it.

Exactly right

[FranTaylor]

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.