About ConVirt

Q. What is ConVirt?

A. ConVirt is a tool for provisioning, administering and monitoring virtualized environments. Easy to use yet remarkably deep and sophisticated, ConVirt is a single, complete solution whether you wish to manage a few Virtual Machines (VM's) on a single workstation, or 1000's spread across 100's of servers in a data center.

Q. Who is ConVirt for?

A. Data Center administrators, QA/DevTest lab managers, System administrators, and last but not least, anyone starting out and/or evaluating virtualization. We've specifically designed ConVirt to be accessible to those new to virtualization while, at the same time, be deep, flexible and powerful enough to satisfy data center class requirements.

Q. What are ConVirt's features?

A. Pretty much everything you'll need for soup-to-nuts management of a Virtual Machine's lifecycle --- from its inception as a provisioning template, all the way through to monitoring, migration and policy based administration during its deployment. For a more detailed list, hit the Features page on our main website.

Q. Which virtualization platforms does ConVirt support?

A. Open Source Xen and KVM. More coming soon!

ConVirt has a plugin architecture that allows new platforms to be added easily. We, along with the ConVirt Community, will continue to add more supported platforms over the coming months. (the Plug-in Development Guide is available in the Developer Resources section, in case you wish to contribute).

Q. Which Operating Systems is the ConVirt client available for?

A. All flavors of Linux.

Note to Windows users: While a native Windows client isn't available (yet), most ConVirt users on Windows use VNC or Xming and report trouble-free operation.

Q. What does ConVirt cost?

A. Zip! Zero! Nada! ConVirt is completely free and open source software, so you can download, deploy and use it whenever and wherever you like.

Q. Which license is ConVirt distributed under?

A. The GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPLv2).

About ConVirt 2.0

Q. What is new in ConVirt 2.0 ?

A. ConVirt 2.0 is a multi-tier web based application that allows provisioning, administering and monitoring virtualized environments. Easy to use yet remarkably deep and sophisticated, ConVirt is a single, complete solution whether you wish to manage a few Virtual Machines (VM's) on a single workstation, or 1000's spread across 100's of servers in a data center.

Here are some highlights

• Supports all functionality of ConVirt 1.1
  • Template Based Provisioning
  • Dashboards
  • Live Migration
  • Smart Initial Placement
  • VM Lifecycle operations
  • Storage and Network management
  • All platforms for managed servers.
  • etc.

• But all these now are done using an interactive Ajax based web user interface.
• Allows multiple administrators to manage the same environment.
• Provides historical measurements for Virtual machines and Servers.
• Much richer dashboards for ease of management.
• Task subsytem that performs background operations and other asynchronous activities.

Q. What technologies does ConVirt 2.0 use ?

A. ConVirt uses the following technologies

• TurboGears2 Python based web framework
• ExtJs library for Rich User interface.
• FLOT for charting
• MySQL Database as information repository

Q. What distributions have ConVirt 2.0 developed/tested on ?

A. ConVirt is developed/tested on

• Fedora, Cent OS and Ubuntu.
• Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 browsers

Using ConVirt 2.0

Q. Question about using ConVirt ?

A. Answer to the question related to ConVirt usage...

Troubleshooting ConVirt 2.0

Q. I can not get to Console of a Virtual Machine ?

A. ConVirt uses VNC applet to access the console of the Virtual Machine. For this to work correctly you need to

• Have Java Plugin installed and enabled in the browser and
• VNC Setup outlined should be done.
• The firewall should allow TCP traffic for the default port range used by ConnVirt (6900-6999). This needs to be done on the managed server or more precisely VNC Proxy host as mentioned in the VNC Seutp section.

Miscellaneous

Q. I have a question that isn't answered in the FAQ. What should I do?

A. Ask us in one of our forums. We monitor the forums closely, so you are likely to get a response very quickly.