OpenStack releases Gazpacho as VMware pressure pushes enterprises toward open infrastructure alternatives

OpenStack‘s 33rd release arrived this week with a focus that reflects where enterprise infrastructure conversations currently sit. Version 2026.1, named Gazpacho, targets workload migration, operational automation, and hardware flexibility, arriving at a moment when licensing changes and sovereignty concerns are making VMware dependence feel more expensive and more complicated than it did a few years ago.

The release came from roughly 500 contributors across about 100 organizations, producing around 9,000 code changes over six months. The scale of that contribution matters less than its direction. Operators rather than developers drove the priorities this cycle, and the resulting features reflect that shift in a fairly concrete way.

Migration tooling received notable attention. Improved cross-zone migration in Watcher and live migration with vTPM support in Nova address a sticking point that has limited OpenStack’s appeal in regulated industries for years. Workloads that need to move without losing security guarantees now have better options within the platform, which makes OpenStack a more credible destination for organizations actively looking to reduce VMware exposure rather than simply running a parallel evaluation.

On the operational side, Ironic now auto-detects deployment interfaces and protocols, removing manual steps that previously consumed significant operator time. Trait-based scheduling also arrives in this release, allowing workloads to match against actual hardware characteristics rather than generic abstractions. Neither feature is dramatic on its own. In aggregate, they reduce the kind of low-level friction that accumulates into real overhead at scale.

Performance improvements include parallel live migrations in Nova, which allows multiple memory transfer connections during workload moves. For large environments where single-threaded migrations create bottlenecks, that addition carries practical weight. Additional improvements across volume attachment, QEMU defaults, and Neutron’s OVN driver contribute incrementally to environments running production workloads.

One figure in the release data stands out alongside the technical changes. Approximately 40 percent of contributions came from European developers, reflecting the regional momentum building around open infrastructure as digital sovereignty moves from policy discussion into procurement decisions. European governments and enterprises are actively evaluating alternatives to US-controlled infrastructure stacks, and OpenStack fits that requirement in ways that proprietary platforms cannot.

Gazpacho does not position OpenStack as a simple VMware replacement. It requires expertise, operational commitment, and tolerance for complexity. For organizations willing to make that trade in exchange for control and cost predictability, this release moves the platform meaningfully forward.