VMware recently announced its vision for One Cloud and OpenStack, but it hasn’t been met with enthusiasm from all corners. Red Hat’s General Manager of Product Strategy, Bryan Che, has stated that it is fundamentally flawed because of different requirements for infrastructure, which creates a limited cloud that is not optimised to run any workload.
Bryan Che went into several key points about how the VMware strategy is wrong or won’t work.
OpenStack API’s are for Cloud admins, not developers – Bryan Che states that OpenStack API’s are not oriented at developers, so developers building apps in the cloud don’t want to think about underlying infrastructure, managing storage or configuring network topologies. What they want is to build microservices or mobile interface or analytics capabilities.
What OpenStack API’s are for is cloud administrators that want to offer public-cloud-like infrastructures in their own datacentre.
OpenStack is for scale out; Virtualisation is for scale up.
As an IaaS cloud, OpenStack is optimised for running scale-out architectures and cloud-native workloads. Che says that: "Indeed, one of the hallmarks of true IaaS clouds is their seemingly infinite pool of capacity. If you need more capacity, just add it and it’s available. When you don’t need it anymore, shut it down and reduce your app footprint."
Although you can run OpenStack on top of vSphere, Che states that you end up limiting the capabilities of OpenStack for running cloud-native apps. This is because vSphere has limited the capacity to scale out.
VMware’s Integrated OpenStack product with its top-of-the-line vSphere Enterprise Plus offering is offered as free. However, Bryan Che questions the legitmacy of this claim. Che states that not only would you have to purchase VMware’s most expensive virtualisation product, but you’d also have to purchase production support.
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The criticisms levelled at VMware don’t stop there, Bryan Che points out that although you can use OpenStack on top of vSphere, "It could only be used in a small environment, so if you want a production-grade OpenStack deployment, then just use the same OpenStack distribution across both environments." As a final note, Che reminds the reader that Red Hat supports this.
