Can OpenStack Replace vCenter - TechTalk 36
Transcript
Hi, welcome to episode 36 of Virtualized Geeks Tech Talk. I wanted to call it episode 35 and have a doover from last week. evidently something about the SDN conversation all of a sudden you guys are not really interested in but hopefully I'll get a uh a little bit more feedback and more uh interaction on this conversation because I think it's one of the favorite for maybe not my usual qu crowd but I get the question more often more oftent times than I thought I should which is can OpenStack replace VMware vsenter you know it's interesting Maybe about a year and a half ago, uh service provider or uh OpenStack um integrator Morantis had a caused quite a bit of stir kind of in the virtualization world by saying that uh PayPal which is a very huge VMware Vspirit customer had abandoned Vspear in lie of OpenStack.
that turns out to be a little bit less than what the truth is. But I think the question is out there legitimately that the reason why it caused so such a stir is because of the frustration with the uh virtualization market. I think if you look at the virtualization market in general uh VMware you know you look at Gartner's uh magic quadrant and VMware's vSpear is at the top again. And I had a very interesting conversation with uh an analyst type uh resource and we're talking about, you know, kind of my dig at VMware a little while ago about if VMware is a one-trick pony or one hit wonder with uh VMware Vspear and everything is based around VMware VSpear and how much how long can their dominance last in the hypervisor market and he made a pretty good point.
You know what? HyperV has has got some legs behind it now. You know, it's got some great hairs up there. It's not a a new product and it's still quite a bit away from you think about other than just the ability to virtualize a server, it's quite a bit of ways away from VMware VSSpear holistically and fun functionality. uh you know take a look at DRS uh the maturity of votion storage DRS uh VMware's advanced memory management uh capability and you wonder you know what this virtualization thing is kind of tough and virtualization management is kind of tough so it's interesting when a different player comes along and gives VMware a challenge uh and let's be honest the challenge is vsspear has a perception that it's expensive uh if you run a infrastructure organization and you get challenged every year to reduce your budget and you get this maintenance bill from VMware every year, you're appreciative of the technology, but the bottom line is that we have to find ways to save money and uh VMware really has helped us a lot out a lot by uh reducing the amount that we send to them every year.
So I I can understand the interest in looking for alternatives. Then there's the whole lock in thing. Uh VMware does a really great job of allowing third parties to integrate with their full stack. And I caveat that by saying full stack uh with uh comparing that to just the hypervisor. So if you took ESXi by itself and said, you know what, I want to which is free. I want to take a bunch of free ESXi uh software installations running on pretty decent hardware and manage that without VMware vSpear, you know, without the vsspear suite.
I I want to take uh you know, I have a VDI use case and I want to install virtual desktops in my enterprise, but I don't want the Vsenter tax. I also don't want to use Zen server because you know let's face it VMware is top of line when it comes to virtualization. So I want a top-of-the-line uh VDI solution in Zen desktop and I want a top-of-the-line virtualization backend in ESXi. Well, you know what? You can do that just as long as you buy Vsenter and allow Zen Desktop to integrate into VSCenter.
you can't directly manage the ESXi host from say a solution like Zen desktop to uh you know do the orchestration that it needs to uh build and tear down virtual machines. So VMware has this lock in issue that people want to get away have a desire to get away from when I talk to them. So you know what when there's a open solution such as OpenStack a open management solution that comes on the scene the the temptation is hey you know what can this potentially replace VMware you know what if we say uh can we have a solution that I can still keep my ESXi host and uh take open stack and bolted on top of it and not have kind of the whole vspirit tax would be the best use case.
You know what? That's not going to happen for the same reason why we can't take Zen Desktop and put it right on top of ESXi free and manage it. VMware doesn't expose any APIs, nonVsenter APIs uh to ESXi free. So from that perspective, no, OpenStack can't replace uh VMware VSCenter or VMware vsspear. Uh and then the secondly it's not really an apples to apples comparison. OpenStack and vscenter are most definitely two different things. They operate in different layer of the stack.
So you know what since this is kind of kind of open stack replace VMware uh discussion we'll center we'll use a lot of VMware terminology. So let's look at the VMware stack. You know we have the hypervisor at the lowest level of the stack. Then we have vsenter which manages the hypervisor which gives you a lot of great operational value allows you to control how DRS runs how votion works how uh you manage your storage. So it's a direct management interface into the uh infrastructure into the physical infrastructure and uh abstracting that uh physical infrastructure into a logical virtualized data center.
So we can think about uh vsenter kind of working at the data center level and lower. Then we have the higher level which is uh you know now we get into the vcloud directory vc vcenter automation center and this is a higher level view of the enterprise and this is where a lot of our uh open stack like uh use cases coming into play where we are providing services to whether it's internal developer community or external uh cloud customer. uh we use solutions such as v VMware vCloud director and uh VMware's uh vCenter automation center VCAC as a uh solution to those problems and this is where kind of OpenStack and VMware uh the overlap comes into play.
uh if you don't have a use case for vc and for uh to a lesser extent vc and vcloud director then opent stack really probably I'm not seeing what you might get out of open stack if you're looking at it from straight of a virtualization management solution so openstack isn't a virtualization management solution as it is today but openstack again is open so that means that because it's open I can take the underlying hypervisors whether it's zen server server or KVM or whatever the flavor of open uh source hypervisor uh OpenStack is supporting and I can take some other management suite some other operations center uh similar to the venter.
So in theory, you know, I can take SECM 2012 uh and take a bunch of HyperV units, put OpenStack above that and have a similar stack as on similar Microsoft OpenStack stack uh similar to my Vsenter stack. But that gets us back to where we started, which is a real replacement for VMware. If you have bought into the whole or you if you've invested into the whole VMware stack and the whole VMware solution, it's really you you'll find it you'll be hardressed to find a equivalent opensource solution uh that you wouldn't have to build on your own.
And in theory, that's the beauty of OpenStack that you can take either thirdparty solutions or your own homegrown solutions, build them, integrate them into OpenStack and leave this closed system that's VMware. But you know what? Let's take a realistic look at it. You know, Microsoft has had a long time. Citrix has had a long time to catch up with VMware. And simply put, they just haven't done it for whatever reasons. companies that have real vested interest in making consumer grade solutions or consu uh or productized solutions for virtualization management just haven't been able to catch up with VMware and if you're a shop that makes widgets you know are you really invest any development muscle into trying to replace VMware if the ideal was to replace an expensive solution with a less costly ly solution, then OpenStack really doesn't solve that problem for you.
If you have a different problem that's at that cloud uh orchestration level or that cloud delivery and management level, then there's a a conversation that's worth being had. Matter of fact, we had that conversation a couple of episodes ago. highly suggest you guys go back and listen to episode 33 of Virtualized Geeks Tech Talk where we talked about uh OpenStack and if OpenStack was ready for the enterprise or if the enterprise ready for OpenStack. Well, that's it for this episode of Virtualized Geeks Tech Talk.
We'll talk to you uh episode 37. Thanks.
