Many readers of this blog, as well as my work on the Open@Cisco Blog, will be familiar with both OpenStack and oVirt. I have written many posts on OpenStack and oVirt, but what I want to do with this post is compare the two. Examining where each project has it’s roots, as well as it’s current status and how the two Open Source projects may converge in the future, is a worthy exercise.

So, it should come as no surprise that I’m a big Fedora user. I’ve been running Fedora since Core 1 came out years ago, and I’ve always been a happy user. As my world has converged around OpenStack recently, the easiest way to work in this environment is by using devstack. For a long while, devstack only workd with Ubuntu. It now supports Fedora, as well as using Qpid instead of the regular RabbitMq.

The announcement from Citrix that they are migrating CloudStack to the Apache Foundation under the ASL 2.0 license is a move indicative of what it takes to succeed in large scale cloud computing. Cloud computing isn’t like normal off the shelf software. Cloud computing requires building an ecosystem of developers around it. In essence, it requires a community of people deeply committed to the project. If anything, OpenStack has helped to prove this, as it’s one of the fastest growing Open Source projects ever.

This post by Brad Casemore is rather interesting. Specifically, I love this comment: When it comes to technologies and markets, our inherent optimism occasionally is thwarted by our intrinsic resistance to change. This is true everywhere, but especially true in technology. I’m not saying SDN won’t penetrate the enterprise market, and neither is Brad. It will take time, for sure. What will help SDN penetrate this market is the value built on top of it.

Subject stolen from the eloquent MG Siegler, who writes here about his feelings on comments on blog posts. I have to say, I agree 100% with him. I’ve spent way too much time trolling spam comments over the last few months. I realized it’s just not worth it. Like MG says, anyone who wants to respond to a post on this site can do so by contacting me on twitter.

It’s that time of year again where everyone goes off on email. Fred Wilson does it here, and MG Siegler does it here. I quote from MG’s article here: The only real “solution” is to change the way people think about email. It needs to be considered more of a stream than an inbox. That is, it needs to be more like Twitter and less like a to-do list. As much as everyone hated Google Wave, it was ahead of it’s time in changing how email was used.

So, previously on the other site I blog for, I mentioned VXLAN in OpenStack Quantum. The reasons for this are dictated in that post. While we can start working on the segment ID and multicast address management in Quantum, getting VXLAN support into Open vSwitch can be done in parallel. That process has seen renewed interest recently (see the thread here), and I am happy to report I have setup a git repository with the patches from last fall merged into the latest master branch versions of Open vSwitch.

So, Cisco (disclaimer: I work at Cisco, although not in the group working on the NSSxxx products) has recently decided to stop selling their Qnap OEM’d NAS devices. See the link here. For those of us who have one of these in our labs (I have a NSS326 myself), this means no more firmware updates from Cisco. But, the latest firmware for these devices from Cisco (version 1.5, Release Notes PDF here) does allow for users to migrate from Cisco firmware to the stock Qnap firmware.

Recently, as I was talking to a friend about OpenStack, oVirt, and other Open Source Cloud and Virtualization technologies, he stopped me and had me back up. This friend has a strong background in VMware technologies, but not so much with their Open Source counterparts. It occurred to me there are others who may be coming from the same VMware background, thus I decided to create a handy cheat sheet for folks new to Open Source Cloud and Virtualization technologies who have a VMware background.

Just a note that over the weekend, after a few weeks of reviews, the Open vSwitch Kernel Code has moved upstream. Dave Miller pulled the code this weekend. Getting this upstream will be really helpful for OpenStack Quantum, as the default plugin for that code uses OVS. This is also great for distributions who want to include OVS, but have been hesitant because of it’s lack of existence in the upstream kernel.