Platform9 Enables Private OpenStack Clouds on VMware, KVM

Moving to provide IT organizations with a way to bridge the divide between OpenStack and VMware, Platform9 today announced the general availability of a service through which private OpenStack clouds can be deployed on top of VMware vSphere virtual machines.

The service is designed to make private cloud deployment simpler. Planet9 CEO Sirish Raghuram said the company is now taking that concept a step further by allowing IT organizations the option to deploy a private cloud based on OpenStack on either vSphere or the open source Kernel-based virtual machines (KVM) that are used primarily to run OpenStack, the popular open source cloud infrastructure software.

Fresh off raising another $10 million round of funding, Platform9 also announced today that it is currently beta testing a version of its service that makes use of Docker containers as the delivery mechanism for a private OpenStack cloud.

Raghuram said that while IT operations teams tend to favor VMware, developers are increasingly voting with their feet for OpenStack. The reason for this is that OpenStack APIs provide a flexible mechanism through which developers can self-provision their own IT resources, he said.

“Developers love the API model,” said Raghuram. “What IT operations teams are now discovering is that a lot of those developers work inside the enterprise.”

Raghuram said Platform9 makes use of a metadata construct to discover changes to the underlying virtual machines every five minutes. As a result, IT operations teams can make changes to them without disrupting applications running in the cloud. Other approaches to running an OpenStack distribution on top of VMware do not provide that same level of deep integration, he claimed.

Once deployed, Platform9 provides IT organizations with a single pane of glass to manage private cloud deployments on vSphere and KVM in a way that enables them to more consistently enforce service level agreement policies, said Raghuram.

The rise of OpenStack is clearly starting to exacerbate pre-existing tensions between the IT operations team and developers. Many IT teams don’t view OpenStack as mature enough to deploy in production environments.

Nevertheless, cloud service providers that have lots of internal engineering resources are already deploying OpenStack. Those cloud services give developers a set of agile IT capabilities in the cloud that they now increasingly expect to be available on-premise.

Regardless of the pace of adoption, what’s clear is that IT operations teams will probably wind up living with one form of OpenStack and VMware for years to come. Otherwise, developers will simply continue to push more applications into the public cloud with or without the approval of the IT operations team. The challenge IT operations face is finding the most tenable way possible to enable OpenStack and VMware to co-exist as peacefully as possible.