convirture

Today saw the release of ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise edition from Convirture Corp.

The open source version of ConVirt has been available for more than three years and is broadly deployed and well-tested in real-world data centers — having been downloaded more than 30,000 times. In fact, ConVirt1.x is included in most major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Debian and others.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with the advanced automation and scalability features necessary for running large-scale or mission-critical virtualized environments. By delivering high availability, backup and recovery, storage and network automation, and enterprise-grade security, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT managers to meet and exceed service levels while using infrastructure in the most efficient way.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is also the go-to tool for enterprises ready to move beyond virtualized infrastructure management towards a hosted or private cloud model. With an extensive cloud management feature set, which includes multi-tenant security, delegated control, scheduled provisioning, resource limiting, and many more, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT organizations to offer infrastructure-as-a-service, while ensuring full isolation and compliance with corporate policies.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise supports all of the features available with the ConVirt 2.0 Open Source product including:

Server pool-based management
Templates-based provisioning
Monitoring and configuration management
Comprehensive virtual machine administration
Highly scalable, 3-tier, standards-based architecture

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is available immediately direct from Convirture. Pricing starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts, with volume pricing available for larger environments. A “per virtual machine” pricing package is also available for ISP’s and hosting providers.

The guys over at Convirture have a mission .. “Enterprise-grade management for OSS hypervisor & cloud platforms.”. They want to close the gap between the Command Line based Linux Admins and the CIO’s that want to have nice administration interface

Late june they released a Convirt 1.1 version which apart from some bug fixes and some new features such as support for Virtual Network Management, a preview of a commandline interface that can be used to automate a lot work , and the ability to add disks to a running VM (Xen) They also added a number of fresh Linux distros to their list of supported distributions namely the latest RHEL and Centos 5.3 and Ubuntu 9.04

Their first major release 1.0 targeted to have Virtual Center alike features for Open Source software such as Xen and KVM, with their software being availably in only as GPLv2 , so as of Version 2 they plan on having a Dual License model offering both a Community Edition fully Open Source and an Enterprise Edition. Their biggest eye cathcher was the drag and drop support for KVM Live Migration

I ran into Convirture already ages ago, back when it was still called XenMan and they have progressed a lot so I decided to have a chat with Arsalan Farooq, currently CEO at Conviture joining them in 2006 from Oracle where he served as Director of Development for over a decade.

When asking Arsalan about how he felth about competing tools such as openQRM he replied that “openQRM was different from their approach but very strong in provisioning” , “other tools focus on just on single platform that needs to be managed” and others are absolutely not Open Source …

Today they are talking directly to the Xen API and to KVM. The future might bring more API’s to that list probably some of them in the cloud.

Convirture obviously is one of the platforms you should look at when your manager wants a nice an easy GUI for your virtualization platform ! But it does much more for you , it manages your storage pools , does intelligent VM placement provides you template based provisioning and much more.

Convirture Releases ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise Edition

Have a look at Convirture