VMware is now officially a part of OpenStack.
The newly-formed OpenStack Board of Directors voted Friday afternoon to accept VMware, along with Intel and NEC into the project as gold members. Jonathan Bryce of Rackspace, who is one of the leaders of the OpenStack project, alerted OpenStack Foundation members via an e-mail of the news Friday.
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VMware applied to join the OpenStack project a few weeks ago but at the OpenStack board of directors’ last meeting in late August, there was no vote on applications for new companies to join the project. The board convened during a special meeting on Friday and accepted all three gold member applications. Gold member companies pay between $50,000 and $200,000 to be a part of OpenStack, based on the company’s annual revenue. Other gold members include Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, Dreamhost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. Platinum members include AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE.
VMware’s acceptance into OpenStack comes on the heels of it closing on the $1.2 billion purchase of software defined networking company Nicira. Before its acquisition by VMware, Nicira was a major contributor to OpenStack’s virtual networking project.
VMware has also worked with some OpenStack-partner companies, such as Piston Cloud, to integrate its Cloud Foundry platform as a service into the OpenStack project. Some have questioned though whether VMware’s official role in OpenStack will mean the company’s ESX hypervisor will be further supported in the project beyond the base level of integration. In a recent interview with Network World, VMware vice president of cloud service Mathew Lodge indicated VMware would continue integration work for Nicira and Cloud Foundry but said “we’ll see” when it comes to further supporting the hypervisor within OpenStack.
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.