TechnologyIntegrationPrinciples

Commercial OpenStack Products
The OpenStack open source software is licensed under the Apache2 license. This license was deliberately selected because the OpenStack founders believed it would foster a healthy commercial ecosystem that includes both open source and commercial software. This is, in fact, the ecosystem that exists today.

Host Operating Systems
OpenStack is known to run well on a variety of Host operating systems, including (without limitation):
 * Windows
 * Solaris
 * ESXi
 * Linux (including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, HP's Helion OS, Iocane, openSUSE, RHEL, Scientific Linux, SLES, and Ubuntu)

However, as far as the OpenStack Foundation is concerned, the host operating system is not part of the OpenStack project, and OpenStack should not be considered to be "tightly coupled" to any particular OS.

Guest Operating Systems
There are a large number of hypervisors supported by OpenStack, which are capable of running almost every operating system in existence. Whether any guest OS should be supported by any particular vendor is obviously the decision of each vendor of OpenStack powered products; the vast majority of OpenStack vendors support a wide range of operating systems, including those operating systems sold and commercially supported by competing OpenStack vendors.

Other Drivers
Along with operating systems and hypervisors, OpenStack distributions and products may also choose to include and/or support one or more of a number of free and non-free drivers. This driver architecture is central to OpenStack networking, block storage, and authentication. The majority of OpenStack vendors have taken advantage of this broad ecosystem to provide solutions that are suited for particular environments and use cases.