Convirture Enables VM Management in Amazon Cloud
Convirture is hoping it can spread the use of its multi-hypervisor management software by letting administrators manage their KVM and Xen virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company on Thursday launched a new version of its open source software that lets Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers manage KVM and Xen VMs on local Linux servers and in the cloud. ConVirt Open Source is the free version of Convirture's software that provides basic management of virtualized environments.
Convirture's advanced commercial versions include ConVirt Enterprise, which includes extended automation and backup and recovery, while the premium ConVirt Enterprise and Cloud version offers substantially higher levels of security, integration and multitenant support (see this comparison).
In addition to KVM and Xen, the commercial versions of ConVirt also support VMware environments. The company last month also added support for Microsoft's Hyper-V. Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture, argued that ConVirt can manage multiple hypervisors at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager.
ConVirt OpenSource 2.5 is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and can securely link to the KVM and Xen hypervisors via the new ConVirt Connector. The company says this should appeal to developers and testers looking to extend their virtual infrastructures using Amazon rather than requiring additional datacenter capacity.
"As more of our users and customers move their IT functions to the cloud, it only makes sense for them to have the option of moving the management capabilities into the cloud, as well," Farooq said in a statement.
By making ConVirt OpenSource available as an AMI, the company is hoping to introduce its software to administrators who haven't tried managing hybrid clouds, while giving existing enterprise customers the ability to manage all of the hypervisor stacks available on AWS. It's a safe bet ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise and Cloud are in the queue to become AMIs.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/20/2014 at 10:44 AM