ConVirt 2.0.1

ConVirt is an active, open source project conceived with the goal of tackling the administrative and infrastructure management challenges that adoption of virtualization platforms presents to the traditional datacenter. The eponymous tool "ConVirt" is the project's foremost offering.<br /><br />ConVirt is an intuitive, graphical management console providing comprehensive life cycle management for Virtual Machines and virtualization infrastructures. ConVirt is built on the firm design philosophy that ease-of-use and sophistication can, and should, co-exist in a single management tool. With its central console paradigm, performance and configuration dashboard, soup-to-nuts Virtual Machine lifecycle management, integrated Virtual Appliance Catalogue, and many more great features, ConVirt is proving an invaluable tool for seasoned administrators as well as those new to virtualization.<br /><br />With ConVirt's secure, multi-node capabilities, infrastructure administrators can safely manage their entire environment from a single, centralized console. Most common administrative tasks like starting/stopping/provisioning virtual machines (Guest OS's) typically involve just a few mouse clicks with ConVirt; as do server management operations like scanning OS configurations or acquiescing individual servers for maintainance. Finally, ConVirt's enterprise grade rapid-provisioning and template management capabilities are an invaluable asset to administrators responsible for QA and Test labs everywhere.<br /><br />ConVirt is completely free. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).<br /><br />Installation instructions:<br /><br />1. cd to the location where you've extracted the tarball.<br /><br />e.g.> cd ~/convirt.0.8.1/<br /><br />2 . If you haven't already, deploy python-paramiko (an SSH client library ConVirt uses for remote management) in your environment. Python-Paramiko is available for download at:<br /><br />http://www.lag.net/paramiko.<br /><br />(follow the installation instructions at the site carefully).<br /><br />Here are useful links for the rpms. http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/3714841/com/python-crypto-2.0.1-15.i586.rpm.html http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/5215518/com/python-paramiko-1.7.1-0.pm.1.i586.rpm.html<br /><br />3 . Make sure ConVirt has execute permissions:<br /><br />e.g. > chmod 0755 ./ConVirt<br /><br />4 . Run ConVirt.<br /><br />e.g. > ./ConVirt<br /><br />5. By default ConVirt would use the image store that is in the location where you untared the tarball, so this step is not required. But if you want to use a different location with more disk space, use the mk_image_store utility to create a copy of the Image Store (ConVirt's provisionable Virtual Machine Image repository)<br /><br />e.g. > sh ./mk_image_store<br /><br />This will create the Image Store at the location specified.<br /><br />If you run the script without any argunemt, it would create the image store under ~/.convirt location. If you are a root user, it would create the image store at /var/cache/convirt.<br /><br />Note : You need to modify the convirt.conf to point to the new location of the image store. Change the image_store and appliance_store values in the convirt.conf.<br /><br />Here are some key features of "ConVirt":<br /><br />?*A* Multi-Server, Full VM Life Cycle Management. Perform soup-to-nuts management of your all your Virtual Machines across the data center non-invasively and easily. Easily manage all your servers, and all the guest domains running on them remotely. ConVirt uses a thoroughly modern agentless architecture which eliminates the need for deploying extra software on your managed servers.<br />?*A* Centralized 'Dashboard' View. Get a consolidated performance, availability and configuration view of your entire multi-server, multi-virtual-machine environment at a glance. Perform administrative, provisioning, and monitoring tasks directly from the Dashboard using simple mouse clicks.<br />?*A* Drag'n'Drop 'Live' Migration. Migrate Virtual Machines across hosts by simply dragging and dropping! Whether you are migrating just one, or a whole set of VM's, whether you are migrating them live or cold, its still just a drag and a drop. It can't get any simpler!<br />?*A* User Defined Server Pools . Meet your functional and organizational requirements by grouping managed servers into collectively managed resource pools.<br />?*A* Dynamic Resource Provisioning . No more worrying about where to place that new Virtual Machine, or how best to match available hardware capacity to an ever expanding number of new VM's. While provisioning a new VM, ConVirt selects the best match in the server pool automatically. This dynamic placement helps maintain an even distribution of the workload within a given server pool.<br />?*A* Template-based Rapid Provisioning . Bring your provisionable guest OS images into ConVirt's Image Store and instantly start provisioning virtual machines across your datacenter. ConVirt takes care of fetching and deploying the images to the appropriate servers transparently. Create, clone, edit and deploy all your provisioning templates quickly and effortlessly.<br />?*A* Integrated Appliance Catalog. Browse all available appliances from the industry's leading virtual appliance vendors from within ConVirt. Import an available appliance into the Image Store with a single click and be ready to provision it across your environment within minutes.<br />?*A* Built-in security. ConVirt uses an SSH tunneling approach to talk to remote servers. SSH is widely considered to be the standard for secure remote operations. In fact, ConVirt's approach surpasses what the base Xen platform has currently available.<br />?*A* Remote Server Operations. View OS information instantly for all remote servers. Handle maintenance windows easily by acquiescing and restarting all virtual machines on a server with a single click.<br />?*A* Ease of Use. This is an ongoing design imperative for us. We strive to make ConVirt easy enough for a novice to pick up and start learning about virtualization, while being sophisticated enough to let an administrator get real work done.<br />?*A* It's Free!

Requirements:	No special requirements
Platforms:	*nix, Linux
Keyword:	Administrators,  Convirt,  Create,  Environment,  Image,  Location,  Management,  Provisioning,  Remote,  Server,  Servers,  Single,  Store,  Virtual
Users rating:	0/10