ConVirt Enterprise

ConVirt Enterprise 3

Using the development ConVirt Enterprise 3 the Convirture company helps the IT organizations to use as much as possible the possibilities of virtualization existing practically in all modern server operating systems on the basis of Linux.

The feature set of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud for embedding of pools of the hosts managed by ConVirt in private clouds became the main innovation of the third version. IT departments can divide the resources of virtualization into virtual data processing centers, everyone — with an own set of available templates of virtual machines, with quotas of resources and the separated networks.

Administrators can create accounts in these independent clouds and provide to their users access to resources via the ConVirt web console. Moreover, they can connect the managing ConVirt platform to the clouds of the third firms organized based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), OpenStack or Eucalyptus and to manage resources and access for these clouds in the same way, as well as for clouds on the hosts managed by ConVirt.

Representing a cheap alternative of vSphere, ConVirt certainly deserves attention of IT specialists. It supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, also support of Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is in the future planned.

The prices of ConVirt Enterprise 3 begin with 1495 dollars for a host upon purchase to ten hosts; at bigger quantity discounts are possible. Considering the price of licenses at corporate implementation of Linux, Convirt provides significant savings of expenses.

However meanwhile ConVirt Enterprise definitely loses vSphere on care of study. For example, support of multikhostovy operating systems and hypervisors led to weaker level of integration of a system that as a result demanded бóльших efforts on setup in comparison with a linking of vSphere plus vCenter.

It is simpler than the ConVirt Enterprise Cloud function on creation of clouds in setup, especially for clouds of the third firms: it is necessary for their start and accomplishment slightly more, than just input of credentials of services of a cloud. For all that it is impossible to tell what passed test of cloud functions at us absolutely without difficulties. For example, we faced a problem (the known bug, according to Convirture), trying to display the OpenStack templates created after configuring of a cloud of OpenStack in the list of templates of ConVirt virtual machines.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is on sale as an annual subscription, its price is tied to number of the processor slots used in corporate infrastructure of the customer and begins with 487 dollars for the processor slot at the number of like those to twenty. If it is more slots, then discounts begin to work. At present application of EC2 in Enterprise Cloud does not attract any additional expenses.

The packet of ConVirt 3.0 exists also in the form of freely downloaded version with the open code in which there are no functions of ensuring high availability, backup, automation of transactions with network and memory and managements of a cloud included in structure of the version of Enterprise.