Microsoft has announced a partnership with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud computing platform. The addition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides organizations and service providers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft infrastructure with greater flexibility when using OpenStack.
As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will provide architectural and technical guidance to Cloud.com. Cloud.com in turn will develop the code to support OpenStack on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Once complete, the project code will be checked into the public code repository at http://openstack.org.
OpenStack uses open source software on standard hardware. Simply put, the software can run on an individual server in an existing datacenter or run on hardware configured as a modular datacenter. It uses virtualization technology to create and manage large groups of virtual machines.
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. Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V can efficiently run multiple different operating systems in parallel.
OpenStack was launched with code contributions from Rackspace US Inc. and the NASA Nebula cloud platform. Today, OpenStack is supported by 35 software and hardware providers from across the IT industry.
