The OpenStack Board of Directors met this week and on the agenda was a somewhat surprising action item: Vote on whether or not to accept VMware – once thought to be a competitor to the project – into the increasingly popular who’s-who club of cloud computing.

VMware’s going to have to wait to see if they’ll join the party though.

The OpenStack Board met Tuesday evening but didn’t get around to considering VMware’s application. VMware may now have to wait for OpenStack’s next regularly scheduled board meeting, which is not until Oct. 19. There is a chance the board would reconvene in a special meeting before then, but there are no official plans to do so.

Some expect VMware to be a significant contributor to two areas of OpenStack, including virtual networking – which is being led by engineers from Nicira, which VMware bought – and integration of OpenStack with VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS) tool. The elephant in the room is whether VMware will work to further integrate its ESX hypervisor into the OpenStack project. Doing so could make it easier for VMware users to access non-VMware public clouds, undercutting the vCloud ecosystem that VMware has been developing.

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