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SUSE's new OpenStack is Havana good time with VMware and EMC

Multi-stack private clouds are go in SUSE Cloud 3

SUSE has emitted the third version of its OpenStack distribution, and has taken further strides towards making it a good fit for multi-hypervisor clouds by including full support for VMware's vSphere and EMC's VNX storage arrays.

SUSE Cloud 3, to give the new release its full name, is based on the OpenStack Havana release and includes all one would expect, namely the Cinder storage and Neutron networking components, plus a new install tool based on the Crowbar project.

There's also, perhaps less predictably, integration with VMware's vCenter Server, Virtzilla's platform for managing multiple vSphere environments. Control is one-way only: one can manage a VMware cloud from within SUSE Cloud 3, but VMware's wares can't control the OpenStack rig.

SUSE president and general manager Nils Brauckmann says vCenter integration makes sense because the company “... is focused on making it easier for the enterprise user to adopt an OpenStack-based private cloud solution … that is easy to set up and use in any enterprise production environment.”

The EMC tie-up has come, according to verbiage in SUSE a canned statement attributed to Mark McLaughlin, a senior director in EMC's Office of the CTO, because mutual customers wanted it to happen.

That SUSE is making friends in proprietary-cloud-land should come us no surprise, as SUSE Cloud 2 added Hyper-V support. Hooking up with VMware therefore looks like further expression of a belief that multi-stack environments are common and maybe inevitable.

It's also a sign that OpenStack players are differentiating in much the same way as their Linux forebears, namely by creating distributions that find a way to differentiate by giving users more ways to put the software to work alongside other technologies. SUSE's an old hand at that game and it would be no surprise if SUSE Cloud 4, when it arrives, added hooks into more big-name enterprise vendors. ®

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