VMware Inc. and Rackspace Inc. have teamed up together to create a new, interoperable OpenStack cloud platform that was unveiled at #VMworld 2015 yesterday. The new architecture is aimed at helping customers do away with the complexity of spinning up OpenStack clouds, particularly when it comes to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

VMware’s senior product marketing manager Amr Abdelrazik spilled the beans in a blog post on Monday, saying the interoperable OpenStack cloud architecture allows customers to spin up a choice of VMware’s Integrated OpenStack or Rackspace’s Private Cloud powered by OpenStack. The platform further allows customers to create infrastructure automation using standard OpenStack APIs.

Abdelrazik promised that VMware and Rackspace will work alongside each other to ensure this automation works in both OpenStack environments. He said this was in line with the OpenStack Foundation’s move to enable multi-cloud environments via identity federation.

“We are collaborating with Rackspace on exactly this type of multi-vendor architecture for OpenStack – one that removes lock-in at the infrastructure layer,” Abdelrazik said.

Image credit: VMware Inc.

Rackspace chimed in to say that any enterprise which chooses this solution will gain significant flexibility without any complexity, because they’ll be able to deploy applications across both EsXi or KVM hypervisors, and choose how and where to provision workloads using common credentials.

“This interoperable OpenStack cloud architecture provides enterprises with a Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack environment running alongside their vSphere cluster with VMware Integrated OpenStack,” Rackspace explained.

The announcement came just hours after VMware unveiled version 2 of its Integrated OpenStack platform, which adds capabilities including “seamless OpenStack installation upgrading”, plus improvements introduced in the OpenStack Kilo release, the company said.

Image credit: Jason Ahrns via flickr.com