VMware Integrated Openstack – Overview – Part 1

This articles provides the overview of VMware Integrated Openstack (VIO). Openstack is an opensource framework for creating an IAAS (Infrastructure as a service) cloud. It provides a cloud style API to simplify the consumption of virtual infrastructure technologies. Openstack doesn’t not provide any virtual technologies  to create the OS instances.  It always require hypervisors like KVM, XEN and ESXi. Openstack has ability to provide a programmatic API access infrastructure to the private cloud. By providing this pubic cloud capability in the private cloud,  organizations achieves the following benefits .

• Reduced OpEx.
• Increased developer productivity
• Improved control security and governance.
• Enhanced Operational and SLA control.
• Vendor-neutral API (Freedom from vendor lock-in)

 

 

What is the show-stopper for Openstack ?

• Openstack has multiple components and architecture is very complex.
• Openstack project is just 5 years old and development is going on aggressively. That’s why product life cycle is very short and you are forced to migrate to the newer releases frequently.
• Since multiple components are involved in openstack, upgrading to the latest version is quite complex.
• Openstack compute environment  is completely depends on back-end infrastructure (KVM, XEN or ESXi). KVM and XEN hyper-visors need to short out few issues to make enterprise ready production environment.
• Very difficult to get the openstack knowledgeable engineers from the market.

 

 

VMware vSphere is powerful virtualization product. VMware maximize the servers uptime, reduces the planned downtimes , enables the best performance, ensures the availability and provides best efficiency. Adding to that , VMware provides the end to end support for Openstack environment. In the negative side, you can’t use other hypervisors as compute node on VMWare integrated openstack.

 

The following slide explains the features of VMware products.

 

 

Why Openstack on VMware ?

VMware Inc. is one of the important code contributor for openstack development since 2013. VMware provides the platform to explore the openstack environment using the VMware vSphere and other components. VMware ESXi is one of the stable and reliable hyper-visor  in the world. At this point of time , openstack doesn’t offers any intelligent monitoring and troubleshooting functionality. But VMware is offering  products like VMware vRealize suite to fill those gaps.

 

In the above image, you can see that VMware SDDC has been accessed using the Openstack API. VMware claims that VMware + Openstack is best combination since customers can enjoy the flexibility of openstack with reliability of trusted  infrastructure provided by VMware.  Though VMware Joined the openstack foundation on 2013 as a gold member, Nicira (Acquired by VMware) has created the open vswitch project in 2010 itself before openstack project was launched. In 2011, Openstack project has been created by NASA & Rackspace. In 2012, Openstack networking project “neutron” started and led by Nicira (NSX).  In 2012 , Nicira has become a part of VMware Inc. So far VMware has been contributed more than 40 thousands of lines codes to Openstack and contribution will be more on upcoming days.

 

The following diagram shows that how VMware products are used for each openstack service API.

• vSphere (ESXi – Hyper-visor ) – Nova
• VMware NSX – Neutron (Network)
• vSphere Datastore (SAN & VSAN) – Storage (Glance/swift)

 

 

Adding to the above mentioned architecture,  VMware recommends to include the vRealize Operations , Log insight, vRealize business to simply  the infrastructure operations and management.

 

Hope this article is informative to you. In the upcoming articles , we will see that how to integrate the openstack on the existing VMware infrastructure.

 

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