It’s very tempting to compare vCloud and OpenStack. It’s very difficult to imagine an enterprise Cloud that both would co-exist. I wanted to take some time and really think about the two solutions and give a break down of why comparing the two solutions head to head really doesn’t work.

This isn’t about directly comparing vCloud and OpenStack Public Clouds. The drivers for a Cloud provider selecting a Cloud management platform are different from an Enterprise selecting a Cloud manager. However, selecting one over another more or less locks you into either vCloud or OpenStack Public Clouds. So, it is a consideration but we are just looking at traditional enterprise public Clouds on this post. (Hey I have to save the consultants some work)

It’s important that we take a bit of time to frame the discussion of what I consider the “typical enterprise.” This is the non-high tech enterprise. We aren’t looking at developer heavy environments such as Paypal, Netflix etc. We are looking at the enterprise that is highly virtualized, which looking at the market means VMware or Hyper-v with or KVM and others to a much lessor extent. So, the “typical” administrator will have strong Windows skills.

I believe I’m of the same elk of the typical traditional VMware enterprise sysadmin. If I were to still be in the business of administering servers, I’d be a Windows expert and feel comfortable managing a number Linux appliances within the environment. Thinking about the nature of these traditional enterprise admins brought me to thinking about how I’d go about evaluating OpenStack and vCloud. This isn’t as simple as comparing Hyper-V to Xen. OpenStack and vCloud look to please two difference targets with the obvious overlap.

I like the Networkworld article asking if OpenStack is mature enough for the Enterprise. I believe it helps set the stage for what OpenStack is and is not. Earlier, I asked the question if the Enterprise has a need for OpenStack. When I wrote the article if you wanted to bring OpenStack in-house and compare it to vCloud you had to basically have a different skill set than someone who would manage vCloud. This is where you begin to see the difference between the two solutions.

OpenStack is a platform that’s designed from the ground up to provide and infrastructure to software developer’s to build Cloud aware applications. I believe OpenStack see’s application developer’s as the ultimate customer. This is an important observation. With earlier versions of OpenStack the administrator who wanted to take it for a dry run would find that they needed developer lite skills. This is a different skillset than most administrators that run Windows infrastructures. Most Linux admins wouldn’t have too much of a problem installing the solution. However, once you did get it installed what do you do with it? There was no portal that we see in solutions live vCenter and System Center Operation’s Manager (SCOM).

After, getting OpenStack installed you had all of the services running that allowed applications to leverage the virtual resources through OpenStack’s API’s. The admin had some ability to define and configure physical compute, storage and network resources for provisioning via the command line and scripts. This is foreign to the target administrator and is a completely different approach to consuming physical resources vs. the VMware model. It’s not better or worse, it’s different. However, who are the solutions targeting when it comes to the enterprise?

Developer’s build applications and don’t manage the data center. But given the option of which solution best supports their goals for building Cloud aware applications, I believe they’d understand and prefer the OpenStack model for Cloud management. But, again they don’t run the data center.

Administrators install, configure and administer data center management tools. They normally have a different set of requirements and general interests for management software than developers. Their roles are fundamentally different and this shows from the actually installation of the solutions.

That’s why I like how OpenStack is maturing. Rackspace now offers a packaged install for OpenStack. I haven’t played around with it yet but I plan to get it in the lab and see if the interface makes sense to a traditional Sysadmin such as I used to be.

VMware actually has the opposite problem. vCloud does a great job of provisioning physical resources similar to how we do and understand it today. vCloud wasn’t designed from the ground up to provide a different approach to infrastructure consumption. It’s a Cloud manager bolted on top of vSphere. The previous VMware management team’s approach was to marry Cloud Foundry and vCloud to provide the rich API’s that developer’s need to build Cloud aware applications within the enterprise. However, VMware has since refocused on its core hypervisor and Data Center management software products. Cloud Foundry will continue to be a hypervisor independent solution for building Cloud applications.

I’m not a fashion guy but I know if I buy a pair of Nike Air Jordans and a Air Jordan Jump Suit then I have a pretty good idea that I will have a matching outfit without much thought. This is vCloud and vSphere. They are more or less the same. If the end customer are other administrators then it’s easy to design a consumption model based on provisioning virtual machines or vApps. For large organizations that have multiple system administrators that need to provision virtual machines, vCloud Director just feels comfortable. It takes more work to make developers feel the same way.

So, like most software evaluations it boils down to the business requirements and the features needed. What type of service are you trying to deliver and to what consumers of the Cloud ends up being the driver. After the decision is made I think from a pure OpenStack vs. VMware becomes a much simpler comparison with one caveat. That being your Public Cloud strategy. If you have some religious, political or business driver that forces OpenStack over VMware or vice versa then you have some work.

Either solution can be made to fit the needed use case but you will need customize each solution to get you to where you need to be functionally. This could have been a much bigger post that looked at the actual features and more limitations of each platform. But, that’s what the comments section and Twitter are for