Microsoft Win Server to get pushed off OpenStack Linux cloud?

Windows servers could face problems running clouds built on OpenStack if the Linux-for-the-cloud project follows the suggestion of one lead developer.

Code for Microsoft's Hyper-V should be removed from the up-coming Essex release of OpenStack because it's essentially been forgotten about, according to OpenStack release manager Thierry Carrez.

Carrez floated the idea of trimming the "dead wood" from Essex, due in April here, which was re-broadcast by Read Write Web here.

According to Carrez, the Hyper-V support in Essex is both broken and unmaintained - in other words, nobody's bothered to look after it.

"Just as Nova enters feature freeze, it sounds like a good moment to consider removing deprecated, known-buggy-and-unmaintained or useless feature code from the Essex tree," Carrez wrote.

Nova is the compute leg of OpenStack; there are two more legs, for storage and networking.

Microsoft announced in October 2010 a partnership with OpenStack start-up Cloud.com, working on helping companies spin up Amazon-style infrastructure-as-a-cloud, to integrate Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V with the OpenStack project.

Redmond promised it would give Cloud.com architectural and technical guidance with Cloud.com developing the code to support OpenStack on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

"The addition of Microsoft's virtualization product puts customers in an excellent position to reach economies of scale to run Windows- and Linux-based infrastructure," Microsoft boasted.

Cloud.com, though, was swallowed by OpenStacker Citrix Systems last year and its people put to work building and delivering Citrix's CloudStack. Microsoft, it seems, has not picked up the slack; Redmond has a track record of working through intermediaries on open-source projects rather than getting directly involved and OpenStack on HyperV looks like a casualty of this policy.

The suggestion of a single project member doesn't mandate or pre-determine policy and judging by the thread there's been little response to Carrez so far; it may well be the Hyper-V code stays dormant in Essex or is removed and re-inserted at a later date.

Either way, Microsoft should perhaps become engaged or risk losing business for Windows Server to other operating systems that have been turned to fluff workloads on OpenStack clouds. ®