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It's a very freaky cloud, the kind you don't take home to mother

Platform9 suggests OpenStack act as SUPERFREAK for vSphere control freak

Imagine for a moment you're a sysadmin that's embraced VMware for server virtualisation, so you have a fleet of well-used servers and the ability to dial them up and down as required.

But you haven't gone all-in with the vCloud Suite, perhaps because of cost concerns or perhaps you don't have the chops to handle it.

If that's you, Platform9 has a proposition for you: add OpenStack to the mix and use it as a control freak to kick vSphere up a level at which it becomes a proper private cloud.

If this sounds like overkill, worry not: Platform9's plan is to offer you OpenStack-as-a-service, plus some on-premises agents, and let OpenStack become your private cloud control freak for the sum of US$49 per month.

Platform 9 has form with this approach, having first tried it on AWS and then offering it to KVM users.

The VMware offering is now in beta and the company is working on doing the same thing for Docker.

“We think vCenter is a very good tool,” Platform9's co-founder and CEO Sirish Raghuram told The Reg's virtualization desk. “If you have it, keep using it for operational workflow. But we are layering on resource pooling, automation, self-service for end-users which is the missing piece and which makes it a private cloud.”

Raghuram and his colleagues are former VMware staffers, and feel that OpenStack's management and automation capabilities have, in some ways, exceeded Virtzilla's. Making OpenStack as-a-service vSphere's control freak will, they reckon, give users access to that innovation on the cheap.

VMware won't like this idea because upselling customers to management tools is one of its key growth goals and conversion rates for such sales often get a mention in its results presentations. On the upside, Platform9's hardly a titan with a globe-spanning salesforce. But with SaaS, it doesn't need to be. ®

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