Canonical and Convirture Partner On Ubuntu Virtualization
Canonical has made a lot of headlines lately as it pushes desktop Ubuntu in uncharted directions. Lest the company’s commitment to the server market be questioned, however, it recently announced a partnership with Convirture for delivering enterprise-grade virtualization infrastructure based on Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters.
But first, a little reminiscing: as recently as a few years ago, VMware’s proprietary virtualization solutions were the only real show in town when it came to the enterprise market. Open-source virtualization technologies, such as KVM and (to a slightly lesser extent) Xen, remained in development and lacked the management tools for easy deployment across large environments.
Today, however, KVM and Xen have fully matured and can deliver the features and stability demanded by the enterprise. At the same time, third-parties have introduced tools to help manage KVM- and Xen-based virtualization infrastructures. Among them is ConVirt, a utility developed by Convirture and available in open-source and enterprise versions.
On the heels of the introduction of ConVirt version 2.0, Canonical and Ubuntu announced a partnership to make the new release of the software available via Ubuntu’s partner repository, as part of an effort to enhance the virtualization tools available on Ubuntu servers.
Why It Matters
Granted, the availability of the software in Ubuntu’s partner repository may not be the most rousing news you’ll hear this week. But the significance of the announcement becomes evident when viewed within the context of the broader context of Canonical’s virtualization and cloud strategies.
For one, this move provides Ubuntu server users with a better alternative to vCenter, the proprietary virtualization-management solution offered by VMware. Choice is always a good thing, and having alternatives to VMware’s offerings that are easy to integrate within Ubuntu can only benefit users.
In addition, because ConVirt can be used to manage virtual machines that form a private cloud, Canonical’s partnership with Convirture underscores the former company’s aggressive pursuit of the cloud niche. It has been clear for some time that Canonical hopes to set Ubuntu server edition apart from other enterprise-grade Linux distributions by streamlining Ubuntu’s compatibility with cloud setups, and the Convirture news provides further evidence of this endeavor.
Last but not least, it’s encouraging to see Canonical working closely with the developers of ConVirt because that tool represents the only major alternative to Red Hat’s VirtManager. As much as I’ve tried to love VirtManager, I’ve never been particularly satisfied with it due to lack of stability and general bugginess. The application remains in development and may well work better at a future date, but for the time being, I’m happy to have ConVirt 2.0 as an alternative.
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“Last but not least, it’s encouraging to see Canonical working closely with the developers of ConVirt because that tool represents the only major alternative to Red Hat’s VirtManager. ”
You need to take a look at Proxmox VE (pve.proxmox.com). I use it at my place of employment with excelent results. It is a free, open source management interface for both KVM and OpenVZ in one package.
Although I have to admit, ConVirt looks more polished than Proxmox VE, from what I can tell from the screenshots. Proxmox VE has a very similar feature set, however.
Bernardo: thanks for the link. I gather, though, that Proxmox VE and ConVirt are not quite the same thing. The former looks like it provides the whole virtualization environment (hence the name, I guess), whereas ConVirt is simply an application for managing a virtual environment which exists independently (and which as such can be based either on Xen or KVM, whereas with Proxmox it looks like KVM is the only option for full virtualization).
This isn’t to say Proxmox is bad, just that it fills a slightly different niche. Or am I missing something?
Are Canonical actually working closely with convirt? I checked the source and couldn’t find any contributions from canonical – is this just about shipping their bits?
Mike: as far as I know Canonical is not actually involved in ConVirt development. But by putting the application in the Partner Repository, Canonical is committing to making sure it’s 100 percent supported on Ubuntu.
I am using proxmox in a bussines enviroment and it has some issue that convirt can cover: HA in vm and HA in server. The last version of proxmox 1.7 has not HA native, you have to do hard work to put the solution in that mode.
Be other way proxmox is open and the best solution of Convirt is under paid.