Looks attractive...
anyone out there has real world experience with this?
SUSE has emitted the third version of its OpenStack distribution, and has taken further strides towards making it a good fit for multi-hypervisor clouds by including full support for VMware's vSphere and EMC's VNX storage arrays. SUSE Cloud 3, to give the new release its full name, is based on the OpenStack Havana release and …
Why do you find it attractive?
Hardly anyone other than large hosting vendors is using it. It's a nightmare to setup / manage / maintain compared to more conventional stacks - and imo is primary suited to large vendor hosted multi-tenant farms where a high degree of in house customisation and integration testing is required anyway. Not something your average SME or Enterprise should normally consider. Vmware V-Cloud Director and Microsoft System Centre are both more suitable for those markets.
Vanilla OpenStack can be painful to set up, that's why SUSE Cloud also includes the Crowbar project mentioned in the article: basic infrastructure nodes (control, storage, etc) set up in ~20min; new servers can be just plugged into the network to be automagically discovered & allocated to roles.
OpenStack in general is targeted at public & private cloud infrastructure: last user survey had about 65% of respondents doing private. It also has the advantage of being hypervisor-agnostic: so you don't have to waste valuable vsphere licenses on basic stuff that can be satisfied with xen or kvm on linux.