Is the fox in the hen house? Using vSphere for your hypervisor in OpenStack

IT professionals considering OpenStack for IaaS are assuming that KVM will be required in their OpenStack deployment. After all, it is the defacto standard with many of today’s public OpenStack deployments. KVM aligns nicely with an open source strategy and/or mandate that are common place in IT departments. But in some large enterprise companies, they have dismissed OpenStack simply because they can’t afford to operationalize a new hypervisor and they don’t realize that their existing hypervisor (vSphere) can actually work under the OpenStack framework. This is a horrible result for the OpenStack community and if you’ve seen this happen or worried about this happening, this talk will help you understand the details of how to deploy OpenStack leveraging vSphere as the hypervisor. This talk will highlight some key architectural differences in an OpenStack deployment when vSphere is leveraged - Nova compute and vCenter interaction/architecture - vSphere Cluster features that can be leveraged in OpenStack - How the storage subsystem in vSphere works with cinder (leverages VMFS/NFS datastores in vSphere) - Upgrades of vSphere in an OpenStack deployment

Steve Tegeler is a Director of systems engineering in VMware's Networking & Security Business unit where he currently leads a team of experts who help customers deploy OpenStack in their organizations. Over the last 10 years Steve has spent a tremendous amount of time with IT departments making choices around IaaS. Steve came to VMware through the acquisition of Nicira. At Nicira, Steve spent time not only on Network & Security virtualization, but the overall automation strategy. He's seen a lot of success, and also a lot of failures.

Nathan Ness has been a part of the Networking and Security Business Unit since the acquisition of Nicira. His background includes datacenter networking and security with an emphasis in cloud and virtualization technologies. He recently became a CTO Ambassador at VMware representing the NSBU and VMware Integrated OpenStack BU. He holds certifications in Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware NSX.