In November 2008 the company Digital Networks UK (DNUK) released a self-contained open source management platform called Openvirt, using Ubuntu Server 8.10 as underlying operating system and supporting the KVM build included in Linux kernel 2.6.27.
At that time the product leveraged Libvirt 0.4.4.
After one year and a half the company is back with Openvirt 2.0 which has a number of new features.
This time the OS is Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS and the KVM build is the one included in kernel 2.6.33.
The new Libvirt version used is 0.80.
The Openvirt minimal UI allows to perform basic virtual machines administration tasks (power on/off, suspend, edit configuration, etc.) as well as more complex activities like VMs live migration, templates management and real-time performance logging.
Guest OSes can be accessed through a Java console.
The new capabilities introduced with this 2.0 version include:
- a clustered architecture
- support for Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM)
- Guest OSes disk usage monitor
- Centralised SQL server for monitoring records
- Batch cloning
Openvirt has been tested (which is clearly different from “supports”) with a wide range of guest OSes, including Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 (32/64bit), Novell SLES 10 and 11, Red Hat RHEL from 5.0 to 5.5, Ubuntu Server from 6.06 to 10.04 LTS and a bunch of others.