Sorry, you're wrong The VMWare / Openstack decision is without a doubt a technical one. A technical decision that will grow to describe your entire development and deployment ecosystem. Please read my post again. Openstack has no concept of availability. It depends on you horizontally scaling your app, and not putting important data on the instances ephemeral storage. This is NOT a knock on Openstack -- I'm fairly certain this is by design. in fact if you can deploy applications in this fashion its much preferable than to the standard 'pets' model of instances that VMWare is so good at. Its just a totally different use case than VMWare. Not bad or good -- they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence, but they always seem to be. Apples and Oranges. Pets and Cattle.

You make some good points here. Its important to note that most of the time 'traditional' workloads are best left to a solution like VMWare. Openstack is built to run API provisioned, horizontally scaled, stateless workloads. Openstack doesn't have functionality that traditional server infrastructure requires like automated resource load balancing, high availability, or workload placement. If these things exist in Openstack they are static and need to be manually configured. Here is a simple test as to if Openstack is right for you. Ask yourself "If one of my Openstack Nova nodes blows up and all the workloads on it vaporize, does that bother me?" If your answer is "Hell yes it matters" then Openstack is not for you. Go talk to VMWare. If your application is horizontally scaled, load balanced, and makes extensive use of stateless API driven development, and can handle frequent losses of individual nodes then by all means adopt Openstack. Openstack is not for everyone at this point. I cringe at the Sysadmin who adopts Openstack thinking its "free VMWare" They are totally different computing models and have totally different use cases.