Platform9, which provides an OpenStack powered service that allows an organization to turn its existing servers into a self-service private cloud, has announced general availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere environments. The new solution enables interoperability of OpenStack with VMware vSphere and is intended to facilitate OpenStack adoption among VMware customers.
In addition, Platform9 also announced that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding, bringing the funding total to $14.5 million. Menlo Ventures led the round, and previous investor Redpoint Ventures also participated. The company plans to use the money to continue its product roadmap for its growing customer base.
Platform9 Managed OpenStack's SaaS delivery model is intended to make it easier for IT to quickly deploy an OpenStack private cloud and provides ongoing operational support by including monitoring, troubleshooting and updates for OpenStack. With the new support for VMware vSphere environments, Platform9 is providing a new VMware-specific Virtual Appliance to integrate the OpenStack controller services with vSphere resources. The Virtual Appliance works using vSphere APIs and is interoperable with VMware vSphere, so operations can be performed either via the OpenStack control plane or via vSphere directly, enabling VMware customers to have an easy to manage solution to orchestrate their resources as an OpenStack-based private cloud.
"Platform9's mission is to make private clouds easy to deploy and manage for the enterprise. By fully supporting VMware vSphere, we are enabling every VMware customer to instantly derive greater value and infrastructure agility from existing virtualized infrastructure," said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. "Customers no longer need to choose between the world's leading private cloud platform (OpenStack) and the world's leading virtualization platform (VMware vSphere): Platform9 Managed OpenStack is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere, allowing customers to integrate OpenStack and vSphere seamlessly. Developers can have self-service provisioning using OpenStack while at the same time, IT Operations manages the underlying infrastructure using vSphere."
The announcement follows successful 7-month beta test period for VMware vSphere customers in which the service was tested by enterprises and service providers using VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform. According to Platform9, the VMware vSphere virtualization platform is estimated to run on more than six million physical servers in the enterprise.
Platform9 Managed OpenStack has been in production in KVM environments since January 2015 and plans to offer a beta for Docker support later this year.
For more information, go to www.platform9.com.