Canonical and VMware Collaborate to Enable OpenStack Clouds With VMware Technologies

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - Apr 16, 2013) - (OpenStack Summit) Canonical and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a collaboration that will enable organizations to deploy VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere® and Nicira NVP, with Canonical's OpenStack distribution. Canonical's Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure, the most widely used OpenStack distribution, will now include the plugins required to use OpenStack with vSphere and NVP. Canonical will provide commercial support for OpenStack and will collaborate with VMware on issues related to vSphere or NVP running with OpenStack. In addition, VMware reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system (OS) on vSphere. This agreement will enable customers the flexibility to deploy and reliably run OpenStack clouds with Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure on VMware vSphere while receiving commercial support.

"By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere® support in OpenStack, and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we're delivering customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in OpenStack clouds," Joshua Goodman, vice president, Product Management, vSphere, VMware. "Canonical's Ubuntu technology is widely used by those deploying OpenStack, and joint customers will be able leverage the familiar and proven capabilities of the vSphere infrastructure in which they've already invested."

As part of the OpenStack "Grizzly" release on April 4, 2013, VMware contributed code to add vSphere support to the OpenStack Compute project (codenamed "Nova"). These contributions were built on VMware's existing leadership in the OpenStack Networking project (codenamed "Quantum"), which focused on Nicira NVP. Canonical and VMware will collaborate on software testing, deployment automation, customer support and reference designs. Additionally, VMware's continued support of Ubuntu as a guest OS on vSphere enables customers to run production workloads at the highest virtual machine densities on the world's most battle-tested hypervisor platform.

"Customers in both enterprise and carrier markets are eager to deploy OpenStack in conjunction with their existing VMware vSphere® infrastructure," said Chris Kenyon, senior vice president, Sales and Business Development, Canonical. "This joint offering will be a fully supported and certified solution for OpenStack cloud infrastructure that uses VMware hypervisors for compute, combining existing vSphere real estate with Ubuntu's category-leading OpenStack distribution."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about VMware at the OpenStack Summit
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook
• Learn more about Ubuntu's cloud offering at ubuntu.com/cloud

About Canonical Ltd.
Canonical provides engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide around scale-out computing. As the company behind the Ubuntu project, Canonical is committed to the production and support of Ubuntu -- the leading Linux choice for building cloud infrastructure and running as a cloud guest.

Canonical partners with computer hardware manufacturers and major public cloud providers to certify Ubuntu, provide migration, deployment, support and training services to service providers and businesses. Canonical also builds and maintains collaborative, open-source development tools to ensure that organisations and individuals can participate fully in innovations within the open-source community. For more information, please visit our website.

About VMware
VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2012 revenues of $4.61 billion, VMware has more than 480,000 customers and 55,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective organizations. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.