Canonical Partners with Convirture

The alliance effectively provides the Ubuntu community with an open source management platform similar to the vSphere management platform that VMware developed.

According to Convirture CEO Arsalan Farooq, open source platforms such as Ubuntu are among the furthest along in terms of hosting multiple virtual machines. But as more virtual machines are deployed on each server, the need for tools to automate the management of those virtual machines becomes more apparent.

While interest in turnkey integrated server platforms is growing, Farooq says that the majority of IT organizations are taking an evolutionary approach to virtualization management. That means that instead of replacing existing systems, most are looking for a more efficient way to manage virtual machine deployments that optimizes the usage of limited system resources.

At the moment, Farooq notes that while Xen and KVM virtual machines have been adopted primarily by providers of public cloud computing services, it’s only a matter of time before Xen and KVM make their way into the enterprise as IT organizations look to create hybrid clouds that span both public and private cloud computing infrastructure.