• Ability to SSH to managed server
• Annotation for Servers and Virtual Machines
• IE8 support
• VNC Password for KVM virtual machines
• SLES 11 SP2 certification
• Diagnostic capabilities to reduce the downtime
• Fixes for issues found in customer and community deployments

Existing 2.0.1 open source users should follow upgrade instructions available on the wiki.

This continues our commitment to providing an incredibly robust, free and open management toolset for KVM and Xen-based virtual machines. And bear in mind that all versions of ConVirt are built on the same code base. So, if your organization is looking for the advanced features found in our ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud editions, the upgrade path is smooth indeed.

That, of course, is in addition to the open source cloud-computing project OpenStack founded by Rackspace and NASA in July 2010. Now, there are two open source cloud platforms giving customers choice depending on their specific needs and preferences. It’s easy to see the comparison with Xen and KVM on the virtualization front – with two open source technologies to choose from.

There is so much goodness here we don’t know where to start. We applaud Citrix for its significant contribution to open source; giving the world a complete, deployment-ready, production-stable cloud platform that is as good – if not better – than any other cloud platform available. It’s not just us saying this. Have a look at this piece from Gartner analyst, Lydia Leong.

That invites the question: where does that leave all the proprietary cloud platforms? Let’s put that aside and look next at the good news from the perspective of the customer. There is a lot to like.

1.) Cloud computing is built using lots of open source technologies, for example Xen and KVM. Now, users have an open source cloud platform itself. This evolution makes perfect sense.

2.) Lowers the cost barrier to entry versus other options. That is always a good thing for buyers.

3.) Provides plenty of flexibility and removes concerns over lock-in versus proprietary cloud platforms.

What is not to like (unless you happen to be one of those proprietary cloud platforms)?

This is a clear sign of the maturing of cloud computing as the platform itself becomes commoditized. At the same time, cloud computing is becoming increasingly a heterogeneous environment, very much like the datacenter. There are and will be many options available as Joe Brockmeier writes in his ReadWriteWeb article, “There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud”.

Customers are looking for consolidated management for their IT infrastructure that is multi-cloud. That is where we believe ConVirt Enterprise Cloud can help.

It’s been gratifying to publicly highlight just a few the disparate use cases of ConVirt by customers worldwide including manufacturers here in the U.S., a telecom in Europe using our open source version, and now, use by a city government.

Every customer comes to the table with their own unique needs and infrastructure requirements, but they all share some common wishes: make it simple, effective, robust, cost-effective and don’t lock me in to a single vendor who holds all the (purse) strings when it comes time to write the check.

Look for more customer stories in the coming months and stay tuned for some product news very soon.

For a moment, put aside the rhetoric and hysteria – Amazon and Eucalyptus teaming up versus OpenStack!!! (More on that in a later post)

In his blog post, Andi Mann writes:

I do not believe that Amazon’s new alliance with Eucalyptus clears any significant barriers for enterprise adoption of public or private cloud. Enterprises that were adopting AWS for certain use cases will continue to do so; presumably any enterprise that is building a Eucalyptus private cloud will continue to do so. But neither makes the other any more ‘enterprise-ready’ than it already was.

Agreed. But what this is really pointing at is the future, which is neither public nor private clouds – it’s both. It’s a hybrid.

The real news here is that Amazon is starting to acknowledge that hybrid is the way to go. THAT’S why this announcement matters. And that’s precisely the operational model we see taking root in the real data centers of today and the idea behind our own ConVirt Enterprise Cloud. It manages how datacenter resources are allocated between traditional virtualized applications and the on-premise, enterprise cloud with the ability to transition to Amazon EC2 when external capacity is required. It provides a centralized view of resources, irrespective of whether they are hosted in the data center or a cloud.

We don’t think you’ve heard the last of this from Amazon either. We believe Amazon should and will continue to partner with the likes of OpenStack, CloudStack and any other market-relevant private cloud platforms because it just makes good business sense – for Amazon and its customers.

Replace the frog with VMware, and the water with the virtualization market, and stove burner with competition, and we have an analog to what’s happening right now in technology.

Way back in 2004, VMware was the only game in town. In 2005, Xen received a lot of attention when Xensource received its “A” round. But, at that point, the water was still comfortably cold for VMware.

A few years later, KVM burst onto the scene when it was quickly added to the Linux Kernel. Shortly after that, it was the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V that looked to add a few degrees of heat.

Any one of these competitors might not have registered as even mild discomfort to the VMware frog. But cumulatively, inexorably, the heat is on.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gets this. The VMware hegemony is over. In this recent Computerworld post, he points out that Hyper-V is making inroads and KVM is maturing. BUT – while he refers to RedHat as “the Microsoft of the Linux Market” the very fact that KVM is open source means that there will NEVER be a Microsoft or a VMware of the KVM VIRTUALIZATION market. As has been discussed on this blog, and bears mentioning again: the community behind KVM, plus the ecosystem of vendors supporting it, means that customers looking to try an alternative to a big vendor – either open or closed source – can actually do so.

This is all good news, unless you are a fat, complacent frog that is unaware that it is slowly being boiled alive.

(*No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post.)