VMware may not be one of OpenStack’s most prominent supporters, promoting its own open source framework, the Cloud Foundry, despite losing clients like PayPal to the Rackspace-initiated platform.   Even VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger is not one to hide his feelings on OpenStack, stating it’s simply not for the enterprise.

“Where is OpenStack, we believe, going to be adopted?” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said in an interview.  “We don’t see it having great success coming into the enterprise because it’s a framework for constructing clouds. People have largely adopted and have extremely large deployments of VMware and the switching costs and so on of that are not particularly effective. Where we see it being effective though are very much in cloud providers, service providers, an area where VMware hasn’t had a lot of business in the past and thus, our strategy, we believe opens a whole new market for us to go pursue.”

But that doesn’t mean VMware is not supporting OpenStack at all.  In an interview on theCube, Gelsinger stated that he is contributing code to OpenStack — though he doesn’t see it as being successful in the deployment level, it functions better from a marketing standpoint, rallying support around open source initiatives and concepts.

VMware has two strategies when it comes to OpenStack: Build on a complete stack and Build out a component strategy, follow OpenStack APIs.  The virtualization firm has its own goals within the open source community, and as we gear up for VMworld 2013, we anticipate many will have questions as to VMware’s stance on OpenStack in particular.  Rackspace’s OpenStack initiative has gained quite a bit of steam, particularly in the last year.  As rivals begin to encroach on VMware’s territory with broadened standards that defeat vendor lock-in and deflate high vendor prices, open source becomes a necessary exercise in comradery.

Here’s a brief history of VMware and OpenStack, sprinkled with developments of VMware’s larger open source projects.

VMware + OpenStack : A Brief History

VMware Announces New Public Cloud Hybrid Service – vCloud 

In May, Vmware announced vCloud Hybrid Service, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering.  VMware knows that there is a big push in developers migrating to cloud services though IT is still focused on existing datacenters.  The cloud gives the industry the elasticity it needs while giving the consistency of apps still working on existing data.

“[W]ith the introduction of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, we take a big step forward by coupling all the value of VMware virtualization and software-defined data center technologies with the speed and simplicity of a public cloud service that our customers desire,” Gelsinger stated.

VMware Recognizes the Transition to Software-Defined: Developers Breathing Life into the Cloud

Since VMware’s acquisition of Nicira, it has been a huge part of OpenStack deployments while integrating technology like VMware vSphere and vShield Edge.  Following a pretty basic rationale for its involvement, VMware understands that there’s a “transformation to the software-defined data center,” and that will take several different forms and they want their customers to be able to put together the technologies they require by using open frameworks.

OpenStack Summit Brings About VMware Collaboration

During the OpenStack Summit, VMware and Canonical announced a collaboration that would allow users to deploy VMware technologies, namely vSphere and the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution.  The latter will ship with the plugins needed to run the two solutions.

VMware has set the stage for VMworld 2013 happening in San Francisco, CA.  For more of VMware roundups leading up to the big event, check out our other recaps:

VMware This Year: Key Acquisitions, Mobility + OpenStack

VMworld Highlights 2012 : Looking Back to See Forward