Convirture manages open source Xen, KVM virtualization and the private cloud

In February Convirture unveiled the 2.0 version of its open source virtualization management tool designed specifically for the open source Xen and KVM virtualization platforms. The company also said at that time it had plans to deliver an Enterprise version of the management software. Five months later, Convirture makes good on that promise with the release of a 2.0 Enterprise edition that offers more advanced automation, improved scalability, and extensive enterprise integration necessary to manage a large-scale or mission-critical virtualization environment.

As virtual machines built on top of Xen and KVM technology continue to grow in popularity, it is becoming evident there is a huge void where its virtualization management is supposed to be. Convirture believes they have the answer with ConVirt 2.0.

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As the hypervisor itself becomes commoditized, the market share battles will shift toward the management stack that surrounds the platform. We are already seeing that play out: Microsoft Hyper-V has System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM); Citrix XenServer has XenCenter; and VMware vSphere has vCenter. And $200 million later, VMware continues to try and fill out its management stack with the Ionix IT management technology acquired from parent company EMC only five months ago. Software vendors that make up the partner ecosystems of these virtualization giants are also going after a slice of the management pie. This seems to be the next frontier to conquer in the virtualization world.

This growth and advancement in management tools is good news for organizations deploying these proprietary technologies. But what about the people who are deploying the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors? Linux shops deploying these virtualization platforms have for the most part been without a sophisticated management toolset. Red Hat has been trying to fill that void with its own management software; however, its rebranded Qumranet management tools haven’t gone over so well with Linux users because that management platform must still operate on top of a Windows operating system, which doesn’t exactly make a Linux administrator’s wish list.

This is the challenge Convirture has taken on. The company may not exactly be a household name, but it has been around since 2006, and the company’s open source version of ConVirt has been available for more than three years now. It has been downloaded over 30,000 times, and the company claims it has been broadly deployed and well tested in real-world data centers. In fact, ConVirt 1.x is included in most major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, openSuse, and Debian to name a few.

“Until now, any organization that wanted a complete solution for managing and automating a virtual data center was locked into expensive and proprietary solutions like VMware vCenter,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “That changes today as ConVirt 2.0’s advanced automation, private cloud management, enterprise scalability, and data center integration features now meet or exceed what’s available from proprietary platform vendors. With ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise, organizations considering Xen or KVM as open source alternatives to commercial virtualization platforms are no longer forced to compromise on manageability.”

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with the following advancements:

• High availability: Ensures that mission-critical applications are always up and running by delivering a comprehensive high-availability feature set, including virtual and physical machine failover.
• Storage and network automation: Streamlines the error-prone and time-consuming tasks of configuring network and storage in a virtualized environment. Storage configuration standardizes storage across a server pool by automating configuration of all storage types, including NFS, iSCSi, AOE, Fiber Channel, and LVM. And network integration provides a centralized interface for managing virtual networks.
• Backup and recovery: Scheduled and on-demand backups are supported to help with planned and unplanned outages. Restore modes can be for the most recent state or any earlier backup.
• Role-based access control: Based on their roles, users get automatically assigned privileges and access to managed entities. User actions are continuously audited to keep track of the changes in the environment.
• Alerting and notification: Setup alerts and notifications to automatically send an email when issues occur.
• Integration capabilities: Includes an open repository, command line interface, and programmatic APIs to integrate ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise with other tools, write scripts to perform batch operations, or run custom reports against the repository.

With ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise, Convirture is also looking ahead by adding features that help with the management of a hosted or private cloud model. It offers full multitenant security to enable the sharing of the infrastructure resources among multiple clients while still ensuring full isolation; provides full flexibility in choosing the extent of control that is delegated to each client; allows automated provisioning of the virtual infrastructure based on a predefined schedule or timetable; enables resource limiting to ensure clients do not go above their allocated quota; and supports a virtual appliance catalog that can be populated by the application vendors or by clients creating their own reference images.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is available today, priced starting at $1,495 per host for up to 10 server hosts.

This story, “Convirture manages open source Xen, KVM virtualization and the private cloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.