Today, Platform9 have announced the General Availability of their Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere environments which adds to Platform9’s ability to manage KVM based environments with the SaaS based OpenStack Platform. They have also announced a new round of funding:

Today Platform9 also announced that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Menlo and Redpoint Ventures

Both announcements come in the lead up to VMworld 2015 ensuring that there will lots of interest in the Platform9 team to build on the success they had last year. It was at VMworld last year that I was first introduced to the product and I’ve been testing both the KVM and more recently the VMware Platforms over the last couple of months. The VMware Management has particular interest to me and I can see massive benefits in extending an existing VMware Based environment to be managed by Platform9’s OpenStack.

I’ve put together an initial install and configure video showing how easy it is to get Platform9 managing an existing vCenter.

Key Benefits for VMware Customers
  • Self-Service Automation. Empowering developers is a key CIO priority in the enterprise. With multi-tenancy, quotas, leases and policy controls on resource configurations for workloads, Platform9 Managed OpenStack makes it easy for IT to implement self-service for developers and accelerate their workflows.
  • 100% Interoperability with VMware vSphere. Customers can perform any choice of operations via Platform9 Managed OpenStack or via VMware vSphere: therefore, all existing processes, vSphere based API automation and 3rd party products are compatible and supported.
  • Orchestration using Open, Industry Standard APIs. OpenStack APIs are supported by a wide range of automation tools, development libraries, storage and network systems and application-level orchestration frameworks. By orchestrating their infrastructure using OpenStack APIs, organizations not only reduce reliance on proprietary ecosystems, but also accelerate API driven infrastructure automation and leverage existing open source integrations.
  • Single Pane Across Virtualization Platforms. Platform9 now supports both KVM and VMware vSphere virtualization and Docker support is expected in future. Customers can now decouple their private cloud platform from the virtualization platform, and retain the flexibility to deploy new platforms over time while maintaining a consistent workflow and management interface.
  • Compatibility with all vSphere Compatible Datastores and Networks. Customers can onboard Platform9 with any storage and network implementation that is compatible with VMware vSphere. The solution is fully compatible with both legacy VLAN based networks as well as software-defined-networks.
  • Production Grade SLA for OpenStack. Platform9 takes care of monitoring, troubleshooting and upgrading the OpenStack framework, so customers can rely on a production grade SLA and focus on innovation enabled by the OpenStack cloud platform.

4 - Network selection

For an introduction to Platform9 see my previous blog post here:

Well done to the Platform9 team for the GA and the Series B!

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=1212828
http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=1212827