OpenStack cuts out Microsoft Hyper-V support

The OpenStack cloud project is killing off support for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, as the code Microsoft has submitted to the project to ensure compatibility is apparently unmaintained and broken.

The removal of Hyper-V support from OpenStack was suggested last Friday by release manager Thierry Carrez. Despite a subsequent statement from Microsoft that it was "committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack", the excision is taking place anyway.

The removal began on Wednesday this week, according to a changelog that sets out the need for the support to be taken out of OpenStack via "hypervsectomy".

"Hyper-V has been unmaintained for several releases now. The unit tests are superficial, we have no way to test it, no-one has stepped forward to maintain it, and for a very long time, we've not had any reports that it works," the log reads. "Furthermore, many improvements have been made across other hypervisor drivers that have not been done in the Hyper-V driver, so even if it worked, it would only expose a subset of the functionality that the other drivers do."

The OpenStack cloud platform began life in mid-2010 with a code-sharing consortium launched by NASA and Rackspace.

The purpose of the project is to create an open-standards, open-source platform that will help businesses move to the cloud without the fear of vendor lock-in. Microsoft signed up in October 2010, and support for the company's Hyper-V hypervisor arrived with the Bexar release of OpenStack in February 2011.

The next release, named Essex, is due next quarter. ZDNet UK has asked Microsoft for comment on the removal of Hyper-V support from that release, but had received none at the time of writing.