OpenStack Is Open to Windows' Hyper-V

Microsoft partnerships with leading members of the open source community should no longer come as surprises, and the latest move from the Redmond company designed to open OpenStack to its hypervisor is illustrative of this.

At the end of the past week, Microsoft, Rackspace and Cloud.com announced that they joined forces in order to have the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform integrated and supported on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

Both Microsoft and Cloud.com stressed that the Hyper-V and OpenStack deal was necessary to drive forward interoperability between the two offerings for the benefit of customers with heterogeneous environments.

“Support for Windows Server Hyper-V on OpenStack reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to delivering choice and flexibility to customers in the cloud,” revealed Ted MacLean, general manager for the Open Solutions Group at Microsoft.

Essentially, customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and leveraging the company’s hypervisor technology built into the server operating system, will be able to also deploy OpenStack as their cloud solution.

This wasn’t possible ahead of the end of the past week when Hyper-V was added to a list of open source virtualization products which allowed customers to leverage OpenStack.

“Microsoft’s support for both the OpenStack project and Cloud.com’s CloudStack underscores its commitment to providing customers with technologies that promote interoperability and openness in the cloud ecosystem,” added Sheng Liang, CEO of Cloud.com.

MacLean emphasizes that the agreement with Cloud.com is yet another example of the company’s own focus on driving interoperability, especially by embracing open source solutions.

Companies with mixed source environments running both Linux and Windows, but also flirting with virtualization and the Cloud now have the option to run OpenStack on Hyper-V.

MacLean explained just what exactly the deal with Cloud.com involves, on top of integration and support.

“As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will provide architectural and technical guidance to Cloud.com. In turn, Cloud.com will develop the code to support OpenStack on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V,” MacLean said.

“The Cloud.com team has been great to work with. Once completed, the project code will be checked into the public code repository here.”