VMware Integrated Openstack 4.0 announced in VMworld 2017

VMware Integrated Openstack (VIO) 4.0 announced during VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. This is already the fourth release of Openstack (called Ocata) which is managed and supported by VMware. VMware has reported on the Mitaka release last year and the post was a great success.

So again this year, VMware moves forward and proves that their commitment to Openstack is a long term and that Openstack is an important part of their long term strategy.

The OpenStack development with VMware has started since roughly 2012 when Nicira was acquired by VMware, then during 2013, when VSAN has been introduced, the VSAN can be leveraged for OpenStack deployments.

VMware Integrated OpenStack is a VMware-supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easy for IT to run an enterprise-grade OpenStack cloud on top of VMware virtualisation technologies. 

Boost developer productivity by providing developers with simple, standard and vendor-neutral OpenStack API access to VMware infrastructure. 

For OpenStack cloud admins, the VIO 4.0 provides enhanced platform performance and manageability, increased scale and advanced networking with below distinguished enhancements available from upstream release in VIO 4.0 release.

vRealize Automation (Cloud Management Platform) integration

Another great model of VMware empowers customers to leverage existing investment in infrastructure management and tooling. 

Integration provides enterprise customers the ability to consume VIO resources with governance. Using vRA XaaS blueprints, a cloud admin can automate OpenStack user and project creation, governance based Heat template deployment or other common aspects of VIO consumption through vRA governance. 

Once OpenStack resources are on-boarded, vRA integration allows cloud admins and users to view the VIO Horizon dashboard directly from the vRA portal using SSO (Single Sign On) integration with VMware Identity Manager (vIDM).

In addition, vRealize Automation enables hybrid cloud integrationis seamlessly fit OpenStack into existing cross cloud service catalogs.

Networking advanced capabilities

VIO 4.0 greatly simplifies network addressing and reachability management leveraging dynamic routing.  Instead of relying on NAT to provide address uniqueness, cloud admins can leverage Neutron address pools or get-me-a-network feature to define a scope of unique addresses spaces.  

Tenants needing unique address space can allocate subnets from this pool without worrying about overlapping with another tenant.  

With BGP routing, another VIO 4.0 new feature, cloud admin can enable end-to-end connectivity dynamically without managing low-level static routes.

Enhanced Neutron availability zone support allows OpenStack tenants to place NSX ESG workloads to different physical clusters, across different racks for increased availability.  Finally, Firewall-as-a-Service and guest VLAN tagging are some of the other major Neutron enhancements.

Enhanced platform support

Multi-vCenter support in VIO 4.0.  Multi-VC support with NSX-T allows VIO customers the ability to define multiple fault/availability zones, avoiding single point of failure.  

Multi-VC can also be used for scaling out VIO by adding more vCenters upon reaching concurrency or total object limits.

Enterprise workloads require both horizontal and vertical scaling.  While horizontal scaling is made simple through Heat or Terraform, vertical scaling often requires downtime/outage window.  

With VIO 4.0, cloud admins can offer Glance images that support live resize: OpenStack tenants can increase CPU, Memory, and disk of their virtual machine without VM powering down.  

VIO 4.0 also provides increased resiliency with vCenter HA and LVM support on the OMS server to allow flexible storage growth.

Enterprise Grade Container

Finally, VIO offers enterprise grade Kubernetes with built in security, HA and scale (up or down).  Out of box, VIO provides Cloud Admins with simplified day 1 deployment automation for Kubernetes with multi-tenancy and user management.  

Once deployed, VIO Kubernetes integrates easily with SDDC vRealize suite of products solving day 2 operational challenges in container life cycle Management, monitoring and logging.  

Persistent storage, load balancing and container networking powered by VMware NSX are also standard out of box.

Adopting agile processes is a key driver to help business digitally transform.  It is changing not only the way applications are coded, but also the process they are built and operated.  

In the new DevOps driven era, infrastructure admins and developers are solving the same problem – faster time to value.  

VIO 4.0 is the answer for any organisation looking to digitally transform their business.

VIO 4.0 will enable DevOps teams to build and deliver:

• Container based micro-services, in addition to traditional VM based workloads
• End-to-end infrastructure automation leveraging existing tools
• OpenStack deployment scale out using multi-VC, OpenStack placement API 
• Advanced Neutron and container networking to simplify addressing and reachability while ensuring application security
• Solving Day 2 operational challenges in Infrastructure life cycle management

Supported by the most rock solid VMware SDDC Infrastructure, VIO enables organisations faster time to value.