One measure of how fast the OpenStack open source code project has gained mindshare is the appearance of two developments that few in the OpenStack community thought likely or even possible. They’ve been created by independent third parties, one a member of the project and another outside it.

In the first instance, Hostway.com sought to link Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor and OpenStack clouds. There is no team of developers or subproject within OpenStack devoted to creating the link, even though many small and midsize businesses rely on Hyper-V. The project’s leaders concluded they couldn’t do everything, so they decided to drop what had been poorly maintained Hyper-V support from the recent Essex release. (Essex became available this week at the OpenStack Design Summit, attended by an estimated 1,000 developers in San Francisco.) The OpenStack project managers decided to focus on VMware’s and Red Hat’s open source hypervisors, reflecting the greatest use in OpenStack supporters’ customer bases.
Network Computing