We are really excited to announce that we are working with Microsoft on cloud computing innovation utilizing the Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor. Microsoft is providing support and technical guidance to OpenNebula open-source project to add and maintain Hyper-V on the list of officially supported hypervisors. Hyper-V adoption is rising fast and its support to build OpenNebula clouds is highly demanded by our community. The results of this collaboration will be incorporated into the OpenNebula distribution and so available freely to the public.
We started the work in July and are planning to have a first prototype of the integration in mid October. The new components will be released under the Apache license as a new OpenNebula ecosystem project. In order to provide the greater flexibility, the integration will support both variants of Hyper-V, namely in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Disk images will be managed using a shared storage server (e.g. SAN) and standard POSIX calls from the OpenNebula server. OpenNebula will additionally leverage the networking management functionality provided by Hyper-V. The integration will not require the installation of new services in the nodes, making quite simple and rapid to build an OpenNebula cloud on existing Hyper-V deployments.
This collaboration consolidates OpenNebula’s position as a fully open-source interoperable and innovative solution for the management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by offering common cloud standards and interfaces, leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting existing investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. OpenNebula is used by many research projects as a powerful tool for innovation and interoperability, and by thousands of organizations to build large-scale production clouds using KVM, Xen and VMware. Microsoft’s Windows Server with Hyper-V platform is growing in the enterprise space and this collaboration with Microsoft will extend the list of supported hypervisors to include Hyper-V to give customers a great choice of enterprise ready virtualization platforms.
This is excellent news for the community!. You can visit the Openness@Microsoft blog for additional information. Stay tuned, the first release will be available in few weeks.
Awesome news! Way to go, OpenNebula!