As Barb Darrow reports, “OpenStack, the open-source cloud stack backed by nearly every tech vendor you can name, remains a work in progress, but the latest, seventh release dubbed “Grizzly” addresses some key pain points.”

Grizzly adds support for VMware ESX and “especially” Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.  Grizzly also attacks scalability with a new “Cells” capability that lets customers manage multiple OpenStack compute environments as a single unit. Grizzly also expands block storage options.

Of course, the code won’t go out directly to the end users.  Those who leverage OpenSack will have to merge the new code from OpenStack with their code to release a new version of their product that supports Grizzly.  This should take months, if they do it correctly.

The larger question is if the granularity of the release is an attempt to keep up with the demands from the end users, who are few, or is it an attempt to keep up OpenStack’s momentum.  “Here’s the thing though: What folks need to start seeing is real-live end users at companies beyond the tech vendors that support OpenStack as part of their cloud offerings.”

OpenStack needs a ton more real world experience within real companies to prove viability.  I suspect they will see this in 2013, but it’s going to be a much slower process than the OpenStack groupies would like.