Background:
Recent research indicates that Australia is one of the most highly virtualised countries in the world. VMware undoubtedly represents the largest proportion of hypervisor technology in Australia. Aptira is an Australian systems integrator with strong involvement in OpenStack deployments in Australia.
Bringing OpenStack to Australia:
Aptira has spent a lot of time speaking to customers large and small about OpenStack. Many of these customers are very interested in adopting cloud, but at the same time they have built an existing business around VMware, with all datacenter infrastructure, operational procedures, tacit company knowledge based on this. This translates to a strong inertia, and when the word “CapEx” is mentioned to buy new infrastructure for OpenStack, the inertia becomes even stronger.
Aptira sees the potential in the marrying of OpenStack with VMware solutions for the Australian market, allowing customers with existing VMware deployments to deliver open cloud capabilities to their own customers or internal stakeholders. Customers don't need to go out and buy expensive new SDN capable hardware, either. Aptira is driving the network virtualisation component of these clouds using Nicira, which works using existing, in-place network hardware, offering a much smoother migration to the private cloud model.
We consider our internal use case is shared by many Australian companies employing virtualisation: we have an existing VMware solution in place and to provide OpenStack compute and networking we would otherwise be required to invest in and operate KVM and ESXi hypervisors seperately, along with installing new networking infrastructure into every rack. Exposing existing VMware solutions as OpenStack clouds creates a large resource efficiency without any additional CapEx required and minimal (if any) changes to existing infrastructure architectures.
We'll talk about our experience trying to achieve our use cases and meet real customer requirements using OpenStack + VMware:
- What worked
- What didn't
- What improvements we'd like to see in the future
- Working with VMware and Nicira engineers on OpenStack code
