Dell announced it will enable Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor choice for the OpenStack cloud platform. The option gives customers additional flexibility in run OpenStack workloads within their existing Windows Server environments in private-cloud environments.

The announcement comes one day after Dell said it had changed its plans to build an OpenStack-based infrastructure within its data centers to support public-cloud services, choosing instead to resell public-cloud services by other providers.

Forrest Norrod, general manager of Dell's server-solutions business, said the company had been an active OpenStack sponsor for about three years. “This project from Dell will help the OpenStack community gain additional value from investments in Windows Server 2012, with opportunity to further explore OpenStack-based solutions and workloads within existing environments,” he said.

Dell said it will enable key features of the Windows Server 2012 virtualization platform for OpenStack, including network virtualization, policy-based isolation, Quality of Service and multi-tenancy. Additionally, Dell is working with other OpenStack members for the optimization of OpenStack components, including OpenStack Compute for Hyper-V, OpenStack Block Storage for Windows and Dell Crowbar provisioning.

Dell is planning to for the first set of new capabilities to be available in the upcoming release of the open-source cloud-building and management software.

This effort is in addition to Dell’s current support for native Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, the IT vendor said. Microsoft is working with Dell to provide support to enable interoperability.

Dell plans to also have System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager, federated with OpenStack Image Manager, to provide full functionality. The idea is to minimize synchronization issues to OpenStack customers running a hybrid environment with integration to customers using Window Server 2012 Hyper-V in this environment.

The company has been offering an OpenStack solution, called Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, along with a number of joint solutions with partners.