Chapter 15 - Managing Xen with Third-Party Management Tools

Abstract

Many software companies have developed their own management solutions for the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor and its guests. Many of the third-party management tools are available as free, open source alternatives to the existing product line, and others are part of a value-added suite with commercial support and maintenance. Qlusters, Inc. is a provider of open source data center provisioning and management software for physical and virtual environments. Its most popular product is openQRM, an open source systems management platform that helps to automate enterprise data centers and keep them running. Qlusters has recently made available an extension to openQRM that brings advanced virtualization and Xen management capabilities designed to permit simplified deployment, creation, and management of Xen hosts and virtual machines (VMs). openQRM itself is a freely distributed open source application licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Enomalism is an open source, Web-based, virtual server management application built specifically for the needs of a flexible hosted application environment. It was designed to answer the challenges of fragmented hosting environments by providing an interface to provision concurrent isolated servers using the Enomalism Virtualized Grid (EVG) environment and the Elastic Computing Platform (ECP). Enomalism requires the Fedora Core 6 distribution. Project ConVirt is an active, open source project with the goal of tackling the administrative and infrastructure management challenges that adoption of virtualization platforms presents to the traditional data center. XenMan is a graphical management tool aimed at operational life cycle management for the Xen virtualization platform.