Varying the compute flavor

One of the key successes of OpenStack is its exposure to other hypervisor vendors—no vendor lock-in. As virtualization platforms have continued to evolve over the last decade, cloud providers have faced a major challenge regarding how to unlock their opportunities to keep growing. OpenStack makes it possible to support and integrate more virtualization technologies at pace—more freedom of choice. Extending your private OpenStack cloud should not only be limited to bringing more power to the compute fleet, but also enabling flexibility across supported virtualization platforms. At the time of writing, OpenStack supports the following hypervisor technologies:

• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) (libvirt)
• QEMU
• LXC
• XenServer
• VMware
• Docker
• Hyper-V

Since we have run QEMU in our test environment, and we have briefly seen how to configure it to use KVM in Chapter 1, Inflating the OpenStack Setup, we will discuss in the next few sections how your initial OpenStack private cloud can be extended by supporting other hypervisor types.