OpenStack is ready for VMware refugees

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware left many purchasers in uncertainty (and with it… rising bills). For a protracted time, VMware was the de facto standard for enterprise virtualization. Now many firms are looking for alternatives, and due to this, the OpenStack project for managing cloud infrastructure (and one in all the world’s largest open source projects) is suddenly gaining a brand new influx of users and interest.

Started by NASA and RackSpace in 2010, the OpenStack project today launched version 30 codenamed “Dalmatian“

The OpenStack ecosystem has had its ups and downs and didn’t immediately live as much as the hype, but in recent times it has found its area of interest within the telecommunications world. This allowed the project to grow though a few of its corporate sponsors moved on or reduced their involvement.

But now the OpenStack ecosystem — i OpenInfra Foundation this supports it – it means benefiting from a rapid influx of former VMware users looking for an alternate.

“My 2024 bingo card didn’t say ‘VMware is spearheading the resurgence of OpenStack,’” OpenInfra Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce told me earlier this yr. “It was definitely something that generated incredible interest. I would say that from our perspective, it’s something that’s still developing rapidly, even though it’s been going on for a few months now. I would hesitate to say that I know how this will all turn out. But I think what’s pretty clear to me is that Broadcom has introduced a lot of uncertainty into the enterprise IT market.”

He noted that the overwhelming majority of vendors that help enterprises deploy and manage OpenStack were talking to customers about migrating to OpenStack, and by mid-summer, greater than half had already migrated to VMware.

These migrations, as OpenInfra CEO Thierry Carrez told me in an interview ahead of Wednesday’s launch, are also not as difficult as they once were. However, for many firms, this modification is not nearly changing the platform. “One way or another, this needs to be part of a broader transition to cloud-native workloads,” he said. With the brand new tool, migrating virtual machines directly from VMware to OpenStack takes only just a few seconds.

The real work, in fact, is establishing the infrastructure and adapting operational teams to the brand new management paradigm. “It’s the tools they’re used to that are difficult,” Carrez said. “Once you get used to it (VMware’s vCenter management platform) and interacting with virtual machines that way, you get something different, much more programmatic, API-driven, and it feels less natural. So it’s mostly friction in people’s minds, not necessarily technical difficulties.”

Businesses don’t change that quickly either – and infrequently for good reason. “Sometimes all it takes is a little patience and planning, and full implementation can take months,” said Mark Collier, chief technology officer of the OpenInfra Foundation. “It’s not necessarily about a technology gap, but about what it takes when infrastructure is the backbone of the entire company.”

He also noted that at some firms, including a German automaker he couldn’t name, the duty is now to list latest projects on OpenStack, whilst the finance team could also be working on the newest contract extension with VMware. “This points to a multi-year wave of OpenStack growth, where we are only at the tip of the iceberg,” he said (mixing just a few metaphors along the best way).

For probably the most part, OpenStack does feature parity with VMware and at this point it is a widely known stable system. Recent releases have also helped the team move on this direction. This includes, for example, improved support for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads.

With Wednesday’s launch of Dalmatian, the project is expanding on this theme, adding latest functionality for reserving GPU instances, for example, in addition to adding quite a few security updates, including support for virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPM) and rather more.

Perhaps more importantly, design is now at some extent where it may well reply to latest user demands faster than ever before.

“What this shows is that after 30 releases, most of what’s driving incremental improvements — and even major feature improvements — is simply widespread adoption and our huge installed base of people who really work with OpenStack, and that’s been the case for years,” Collier said. “The way people use infrastructure is evolving and is directly reflected in the code base and new features that arrive every six months. We’re long past the years of saying “we’re just adding a feature speculatively because we think it’ll sound good in a press release.” These are all practical things.”

Now, with the emergence of a brand new group of users, the whole OpenStack ecosystem is also experiencing some revival – as is the job market for OpenStack specialists. Companies like Mirantis and others that continued to support their existing OpenStack customers but didn’t necessarily see much interest within the platform are actually gearing up again to support latest firms inquisitive about the platform.

“This is all driven by customers who, quite frankly, are pissed at Broadcom for what VMware is doing with customer pricing,” Collier said. “We know from open source and the community that trust is key. This is true in all aspects of life, in every business, right?”

If firms commit their entire company infrastructure to a selected vendor and suddenly their bills increase 10-fold, he said, and the partners you worked with in the reduction of on their programs, it is not an excellent look. “It’s the Wild West and we’re just sitting there pondering, ‘Look, there’s an open source alternative that we have been improving for 30 releases – and it really works rattling well. And you possibly can actually select it without just selecting one supplier.