Canonical and VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and
cloud infrastructure, today announced a collaboration that will enable
organizations to deploy VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere(R) and
Nicira NVP, with Canonical's OpenStack distribution. Canonical's Ubuntu Cloud
Infrastructure, the most widely used OpenStack distribution, will now include
the plugins required to use OpenStack with vSphere and NVP. Canonical will
provide commercial support for OpenStack and will collaborate with VMware on
issues related to vSphere or NVP running with OpenStack. In addition, VMware
reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system (OS)
on vSphere. This agreement will enable customers the flexibility to deploy and
reliably run OpenStack clouds with Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure on VMware vSphere
while receiving commercial support.
"By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere support in OpenStack,
and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we're delivering
customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in
OpenStack clouds," Joshua Goodman, vice president, Product Management, vSphere,
VMware. "Canonical's Ubuntu technology is widely used by those deploying
OpenStack, and joint customers will be able leverage the familiar and proven
capabilities of the vSphere infrastructure in which they've already invested."
As part of the OpenStack "Grizzly" release on April 4, 2013, VMware
contributed code to add vSphere support to the OpenStack Compute project
(codenamed "Nova"). These contributions were built on VMware's existing
leadership in the OpenStack Networking project (codenamed "Quantum"), which
focused on Nicira NVP. Canonical and VMware will collaborate on software
testing, deployment automation, customer support and reference designs.
Additionally, VMware's continued support of Ubuntu as a guest OS on vSphere
enables customers to run production workloads at the highest virtual machine
densities on the world's most battle-tested hypervisor platform.
"Customers in both enterprise and carrier markets are eager to deploy
OpenStack in conjunction with their existing VMware vSphere infrastructure,"
said Chris Kenyon, senior vice president, Sales and Business Development,
Canonical. "This joint offering will be a fully supported and certified solution
for OpenStack cloud infrastructure that uses VMware hypervisors for compute,
combining existing vSphere real estate with Ubuntu's category-leading OpenStack
distribution."