Back in February, we reported on the removal of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor from the OpenStack cloud platform. The hypervisor was originally included in releases of the OpenStack platform, and there was lots of speculation about whether Microsoft itself aggressively opposed OpenStack, which is an open source cloud platform that competes with offerings like Microsoft Azure. Now, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with Hyper-V support for OpenStack, which, along with Microsoft’s other cloud moves this week, shows that the company recognizes that there will be many cloud platforms that succeed.
Virtualization and the cloud go hand-in-hand, and CIOs and enterprises are going to demand to use multiple operating systems in the cloud in order to deliver the most diversifed, richest set of applications to users. OpenStack has been virtualization-friendly since inception, but there was a hiccup when it became clear that OpenStack no longer supported Hyper-V.
