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This week in the lab we’re testing the latest virtualization and cloud management offerings from Convirture, ConVirt Enterprise 3.0 and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud. Last year, I reviewed version 2.0 of ConVirt Enterprise, a product aimed at bolstering the hypervisor capabilities that come with every Linux server product these days with vSphere-style management capabilities.
ConVirt Enterprise 3.0 comes with a few enhancements over last year’s edition, but in my tests so far, I’ve been more impressed with the new Convirture’s new Cloud-oriented product, which enables administrators to manage public and private cloud accounts, and to make these resources available to others in their organizations with appropriate quotas and other cost and resource controls.
The product supports clouds built out of ConVirt-managed servers, as well as Amazon EC2, Openstack and Eucalyptus-based cloud environments. I’ve been testing ConVirt with a single-node OpenStack cloud, which I got up and running using the cloud-on-a-stick distribution recently released by the Ubuntu project. I had the live-USB environment up and running in about 15 minutes, and connecting the OpenStack node to ConVirt was a similarly smooth process.
I like the addition of private cloud management to the ConVirt product, since it allows administrators to work with multiple cloud environments using the same tools. For instance, an organization could rough out its infrastructure using a test OpenStack cloud before shifting it up into Amazon’s public cloud, or make a transition between two different cloud environments while offering consistent management views.
If there are particular elements of this product that you’d like to see us drill down on, let me know, and be sure to watch for my full review of the product at eweek.com.