openqrm

Floss Virtualization Doesn’t Care About Marketing …

March 17, 2009 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

It cares about Quality and Frequent code releases. The Open Source community doesn’t
wait till the week before VMWorld to announe big news, they just code along happily and when the coding is done.. they release their software.

And there was plenty of it last couple of weeks. Here’s an overview ..

The New Virt Manager 0.70 is out , it s featuring a Redesigned New Virtual Machine Wizard, a file browser for storage pools and volumes, there are now features to add physical device assignment (PCI,USB) for existing virtual machines.
Qemu, the open source processor emulator, has now a 0.10.0 Stable Branch which will be used to receive bug fixes until at least the next major release .
The qemu-0.10.0 changelog liss better KVM acceleration support, Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support , Nokia N-series tablet emulation multiple vnc clients, and much more platform and hardware support. Eventually this might lead to qemu making current kvm-userspace obsolete, but that’s not for tomorrow yet.
Reuven announced Enomaly ECP 2.2.3, a maintenance release fixing some bugs .
And Matt announced openQRM 4.4 with SOAP Webservices for it’s Cloud , openQRM 4.4 now also implements “persistent appliances” which means that users can now “pause”, “unpause” and “restart” their Cloud appliances via the User-Portal. The internal billing mechanism will only charge active Cloud appliances and now fully provides the “pay-on-demand” Cloud Computing model. Also better integration for Puppet and Sshterm were added. More about it’s new features can be read on the openQRM site ..
And last but not least is the new ConVirt project that has just announced it’s 1.0 release .
ConVirt is a centralized management solution that lets you provision, monitor and manage the complete lifecycle of your Xen deployment.

So that’s it’s for this week’s Open Source Virtualization updates 🙂
Be expecting more updates around the next VMWorld, or when the code is done 🙂

openQRM 4.2 Released, Includes Cloud Sauce

November 16, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

Matt just let us know that he released openQRM 4.2 into the wild. This new opensource openQRM release includes VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer support, a Puppet plugin and the Cloud Add-on.

This new version comes with additional support for VMware ESX, an integration with Puppet for automated configuration management, improvements for the high-availability mechanism and, last but not least, a Cloud-plugin.

This new Cloud-plugin provides a fully automated private cloud with a separated Cloud portal for external data-center users to submit their requests to. The Cloud-plugin features a complete automated provisioning cycle including automatic deprovisioning, Deployment of phyiscal and virtual machines from different virtualization types, P2V, V2P, V2V, P2P, “Clone-on-deploy” and a billing system.

So with openQRM you can deploy and manage any machine inside and outside your firewall. Need that extra CPU load for a weekend on Amazon, fine openQRM will manage it for you.

openQRM is probably the first management tool that integrates both traditional Physical and Viritual Datacenter deployment and provisioning technologies and Cloud deployments all from 1 console , It allows you to migrate back and forth between different deployment types. So you might be running your test servers in the cloud and when you go live migrate them to a physical location within you firewall. openQRM even integrates a billing infrastructure, an administrator can hand out CCU Cloud Compute units to his openQRM users and they then can use resources in the Cloud for that budget.

John Willis said earlier this week in one of his podcasts that that the combination of openQRM , Puppet and Eucalyptus could be the dream combination that makes Datacenter management easier than ever.
Two third is done.. the final step might not be far away..

Did we mention it was Open Source ?

Go get openQRM here or watch the screencast for more information on the Cloud features.

Update: Matt just let us know the new openQRM.com is now live !

Workspace Service Morphs Into Nimbus 2.0

August 19, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Grid is dead, and reinventing itself as Cloud. All kidding aside, the idea of providing a virtual machine instance as a service in the Grid rather than just CPU time with the appropriate environment and libraries to be used by different users isn’t new; it actually makes a lot of sense to provide e.g. a working virtual machine instance for a complex scientific application, which is a lot easier than having to document the correct setup for fellow researchers to implement.

The Workspace Service project part of Globus.org has just announced it’s rebranding and releasing the 2.0 version of what will now be known as Nimbus.

One of the core services of the Virtual Workspace project was orchestrating the deployment of VMs on remote resources as well as the release versioning. Today, Nimbus is a set of tools that together provide a “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution targeted specifically towards scientific applications. Many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

It was formerly known as the “Virtual Workspace Service” (VWS) but the “workspace service” is technically just one the components in the software collection.

Just as Eucalyptus, it is capable of managing clients that are compatible with the Amazon EC2 service.

Open Source Virtualization management platforms like Nimbus , Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and openQRM are catching on. This probably isn’t the last one we’ll learn about. The question is which one will survive eventually.

Qlusters Shuts Down

July 1, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Israel business site Globes Online got the scoop about Qlusters closing shop after seven years in business. The last 30 employees of the company were informed earlier this week of the company’s decision.

Qlusters, the company formerly behind the openQRM project shutters only about a year after it raised $10 million in a Series C round. While the market of Infrastructure Management tools and particularly Virtualization Management frameworks is growing, Qlusters failed to realize its goals and burned through approximately $34 million of capital.

As we reported earlier, Qlusters had no new roadmap after dropping the opensource openQRM project, which recently announced the beta of it’s 4.0 rewrite. It’s always sad to see a company like Qlusters leave the market like this, but fortunately their technology will continue to live on thanks to the open source community.