VSphere

=OpenStack + vSphere=

For the Community
Starting in May of 2013, a dedicated sub-team around multiple VMware API formed. The group has drawn members from around the world and across the industry. The team maintains a dedicated IRC channel at, conducts weekly meetings, and uses the subject-line tag [vmware] on mailing lists. Current focus of development is on supporting core-use-cases and deployment strategies as they come from real-world customers and clients deploying OpenStack + VMware technologies. Customer and client participation is welcome and many have contributed bugs, software patches, and blueprints to the cause.

= Weekly OpenStack VMwareAPI Sub-Team Meeting =

This is a weekly meeting to discuss blueprints and bugs related to VMwareAPI integrations with OpenStack. see: Meetings/VMwareAPI for details and a comprehensive listing of meeting minutes.
 * Meeting Time: Weekly, Wednesdays at 1700 UTC
 * IRC channel:

For Developers
A very complete NovaVMware/DeveloperGuide covers the nova-compute integration with vSphere. And is maintained regularly by dedicated developers. A system administrator's guide is forth coming. The drivers are located in the package nova.virt.vmwareapi in the nova code base.

= The basics =

vSphere what is it?
From a developer's standpoint vSphere is the API exposed by both vCenter and ESXi. The API on vCenter is a proper super-set of API exposed on ESXi. The naked hypervisor itself is the ESXi "host" component. vCenter can be used to band together multiple ESXi hosts to form a set of "resource pools" which have the appearance and behavior of a single logical compute-host but is independent of a single unit of hardware. The resource pools may encompass entire groups of physical hosts or may stripe a set of hosts into logical resource allocations. The net effect is that the virtualized systems will be distributed and handled independent of hardware.

OpenStack instances (known as "guests" in vSphere parlance) have a relationship with a specific host, resource pool, and/or cluster. All hosts have at least one resource pool (an implicit construct in vSphere). All clusters have at least one resource pool. Any host or cluster may have any number of explicitly configured resource pools.

relevant technologies currently incorporated into OpenStack + vSphere (not a complete list, please prefer neutral wikipedia style documents when you update this)
 * vSphere DRS
 * vSphere HA
 * vSphere SDRS
 * VMFS

vSphere SDK

 * Official SDK

=For Administrators= ... work in progress ...