Convirture Manages Xen, KVM Virtual Machines

As open source virtual machines such as Xen or KVM from Red Hat continue to gain in popularity, IT organizations need a framework to manage them.

Convirture Corp today released an enterprise edition of ConVirt 2.0, a commercial implementation of an open source virtualization management platform designed for Xen and KVM virtual machines.

According to Convirture CEO Arsalan Farooq, the Xen virtual machine and the KVM virtual machine are gaining in popularity alongside Linux servers. But neither virtual machine platform provides access to sophisticated management software needed as virtual machines grow exponentially throughout the enterprise.

While Citrix provides management software for its implementation of Xen, Farooq said the version of Xen that is freely available is the one more IT organizations are using most. As a result, Convirture sees an opportunity to provide the management layer that many customers using Xen and KVM are missing because there is no equivalent to vCenter from VMware for these environments.

At the same time, many IT organizations want the benefit of virtualization without incurring the expensive of VMware’s offerings. Farooq also says the VMware’s management and cloud offerings have trouble scaling to meet the demands of IT organizations deploying virtual machines in cloud computing scenarios.

In contrast, Farooq said Xen and KVM platforms are based on more modern virtual machine architecture than the VMware platform, which makes it easier for them to scale to meet enterprise-class performance requirements.

ConVirt Enterprise 2.0 starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts.