In March Convirture released version 2.0 of its open source management console ConVirt (formerly XenMan) for multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
At that time the company also announced an upcoming Enterprise Edition that is finally available today.
This edition introduces the following features:
- dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools)
- high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over)
- virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand)
- network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts)
- role-based access control
- alerting and email notification
- CLI and APIs
Pricing starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts.
While interesting, Convirture may have problems in selling this Enterprise version of ConVirt now that Rackspace launched OpenStack.
It’s not because ConVirt cannot compete with OpenStack, but because one of the key points of the Rackspace message is that the hosting provider is committed to deliver just one edition of OpenStack, subtly criticizing those companies that offer open source editions with less features that the commercial counterparts:
We will not produce “open core” software.
We are committed to creating truly open source software that is usable and scalable. Truly open source software is not feature or performance limited and is not crippled. There will be no “Enterprise Edition”.