The OpenStack project — an open-source cloud-computing platform created by RackSpace, NASA and a growing list of partners — is getting some support from Microsoft.
Microsoft officials said on October 22 that they are partnering with Cloud.com to provide “integration and support” for Windows Server 2008 R2’s Hyper-V hypervisor with OpenStack. Cloud.com is one of the current OpenStack contributors and participants.
The arrangement is similar to other interoperability-focused partnerships Microsoft has done in the past to add Java, PHP and Eclipse support for Microsoft’s own Windows Azure platform, via which Microsoft provides architectural and technical guidance (and in some cases, money) and the partner does the code development. Microsoft officials said that once Cloud.com develops the supporting code, that code will be made available at http://openstack.org.
The OpenStack platform already includes virtualization technology. The code that is under development by Cloud.com will enable the OpenStack platform to integrate with Microsoft’s own server/virtualization products.
The OpenStack project announced its new “Austin” release of its Compute and Storage platforms on October 21. That release added support for the Xen, KVM, QEMU, User Mode Linux Support in the hypervisor space.
Rackspace has made Windows and Visual Studio integration technologies available to customers of its own cloud platform.
