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. As organizations look to deploy large scale clouds on premise, they need to consider building, deploying, and managing these clouds. Ensuring your cloud software has a thriving developer community, with access to source code, ensures the engineers you are using to build your cloud have the tools they need to succeed. It also means they have places to look for help. And source code means any problem can be fixed in house if needed.

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. To get the code, go here. At this point, you have to manually configure the tunnel endpoints, but passing traffic should work over the VXLAN tunnels.

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.