OpenStack is ready for the VMware refugees

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has left a lot of customers uneasy (and with rising bills). For the longest time, VMware was the de facto standard for enterprise virtualization. Now, a lot of businesses are looking for alternatives, and with that, the OpenStack project for managing cloud infrastructure (and one of the world’s largest open source projects) is suddenly seeing a new influx of users and interest.

Launched by NASA and RackSpace in 2010, the OpenStack project today launched version 30, codenamed “Dalmatian.”

The OpenStack ecosystem has gone through its ups and downs and didn’t immediately live up to its hype, but in recent years, it found its niche in the telecom world. That allowed the project to thrive, even as some of its corporate backers moved on or scaled back their involvement.

But now, the OpenStack ecosystem — and the OpenInfra Foundation that backs it — stands to gain from a rapid influx of former VMware users who are looking for an alternative.

“I did not have ‘VMware sparks OpenStack resurgence’ on my 2024 bingo card,” OpenInfra Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce told me earlier this year. “It’s definitely been something that has driven just an incredible amount of interest. And, I would say that from our perspective, it’s something that’s developing rapidly still, even though we’re several months into this. I would hesitate to say I know how all of this is going to play out. But I think that the piece that is fairly clear to me is that Broadcom has introduced a lot of uncertainty into the the enterprise IT market.”

He noted that the vast majority of vendors who help enterprises adopt and manage OpenStack have had their customers talk to them about migrating to OpenStack, and by the middle of this summer, more than half had already done a VMware migration.

Those migrations, OpenInfra General Manager Thierry Carrez told me in an interview ahead of Wednesday’s launch, are also not as difficult as they once were. Yet, for many companies, the move isn’t just about switching platforms. “It has to be part of a wider transition towards cloud-native workloads anyway,” he said. With the new tooling, migrating virtual machines directly from VMware to OpenStack only takes a few seconds.

The real work, of course, is in setting up the infrastructure and getting the operations teams up to speed with a new management paradigm. “What’s difficult is the tools that they are used to using,” Carrez said. “When you’re used to [VMware’s vCenter management platform], and that’s the way you interact with your VMs, and you end up with something else that’s much more programmatic, much more API-driven, it’s less natural. So it’s mostly friction in the minds of people, not necessarily technical difficulties.”

Enterprises also don’t move all that quickly — and often for good reason. “Sometimes it just takes some patience and planning, and that may take months to fully implement,” OpenInfra Foundation CTO Mark Collier said. “It’s not necessarily so much about the technology gap but just what it takes when your infrastructure is the backbone of of your entire company.”

He also noted that in some companies, including a German automaker he couldn’t mention by name, the mandate is now to stand up new projects on OpenStack, even while the finance team may be working on one last VMware contract extension. “It points to a multi-year wave of OpenStack growth that we’re just kind of at the tip of the iceberg on,” he said (mixing some metaphors in the process).

For the most part, OpenStack does have feature parity with VMware, and at this point, it’s a well-known stable system. Its recent releases also helped the team push in that direction, too. That includes improved support for AI and high-performance compute workloads, for example.

With Dalmatian’s release Wednesday, the project is expanding on this theme by adding new functionality for reserving GPU instances, for example, while also adding numerous security updates, including support for virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPMs) and plenty more.

What’s maybe more important here is that the project is now at a point where it can react to new requirements from its users at a faster clip than ever before.

“It just goes to show that after 30 releases, so much of what drives the incremental improvement — or even major feature improvements — is just widespread adoption and our huge installed base of people doing real work with OpenStack, and it’s been that way for years,” Collier said. “The way people use infrastructure is evolving and is directly reflected in the code base and in the new features that land every six months. We’re way past the years of ‘let’s just speculatively add a feature because we think it’ll sound good on a press release.’ This is all practical stuff.”

Now, with this new group of users coming in, the overall OpenStack ecosystem is also seeing a bit of a revival — and so is the job market for OpenStack specialists. Companies like Mirantis and others who were still sustaining their existing OpenStack customers but not necessarily seeing a lot of new interest are now gearing back up to support these new businesses that are interested in the platform.

“It’s all just driven by customers that are quite frankly pissed off at Broadcom for what they’re doing to VMware with the customer pricing,” Collier said. “We know from open source and the community that trust is everything. It’s true in all facets of life, in all business, right?”

If companies bet the entire infrastructure of their business on a certain vendor and suddenly their bill goes up 10x, he said, and the partners you worked with are cutting their programs, that’s not a good look. “It’s the Wild West out there, and we’re just sitting back here going: ‘Look, there’s this open alternative that we’ve been improving for 30 releases — and it works pretty damn well. And you can actually select it without just picking only one vendor also.”