Open Data Center Alliance Tackles Cloud Lock-In

Just how easy is it to move workloads around in the cloud? The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is testing virtual machine interoperability in the enterprise cloud. A new report looks at hypervisor interoperability – just how easy it to move a virtual machine from hypervisor to hypervisor? It identifies gaps that hypervisor and VM solutions providers need to address in order to move VMs between public and private enterprise clouds going forward.   It’s tackling the dangers of “Cloud Lock In” on the hypervisor level, and trying to establish an ODCA VM Interoperability Usage Model.

“A capability for VM interoperability is an important precondition to truly realize the oft expressed benefits of virtualized clouds, such as the ability to balance resources through fungible pools of resources, business continuity and load balancing by leveraging distributed publicly available resources, as well as demonstrable avoidance of lock in to a single Cloud Provider, platform or technology,” states the report.

The report details a test taken to check out hypervisor interoperability, with the specs and components used for the test bed solution stack and hardware components available in the report. The aim was to:

The results aren’t meant to determine interoperability, but rather show there’s room for maturity when it comes to hypervisors playing nice with one another. It includes matrices showing how well commonly used VMs were moved between VMWare, Citrix Xen, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. Who was the friendliest hypervisor during the test? Who was a big, fat jerk hypervisor? You'll have to read the report (note: the report does not actually call any hypervisor a "big fat jerk").

Cloud interoperability remains a concern, particularly with all of this hybrid/multi-cloud talk. The ODCA continues its efforts to resolve interoperability challenges that might prevent cloud adoption.