Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber).
Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them.
The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol.
This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example).
To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts, with its list of “friends”.
Every management task can be executed through chat messages, and geographically distant virtual infrastructures can communicate through remote XMPP servers.