[et-mgmt-tools] Virt-factory 0.0.3 Released

Michael DeHaan mdehaan at redhat.com
Thu Jun 28 22:09:23 UTC 2007


Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Virt-Factory?  What's that?
>
> Basically, Virt-factory is our ongoing project to make better tools 
> for managing a very large number (like a datacenter's worth) of Xen 
> machines and virtual appliances.   
> http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com
>
> For virt-factory to help command infrastructure, it has to have a pool 
> of physical hosts assigned to it.   You can either PXE new machines 
> from the VF server, or register existing ones using a command line 
> registration tool.    From there, you can use the Web UI to add more 
> virtual machines to any of your hosts and control the virtualization 
> state of those machines.   Currently it's not quite up to speed with 
> virt-manager in terms of feature parity, but it does have 
> start/stop/pause/shutdown/etc controls -- we're getting there.    
> Supporting migration is on the roadmap.
>
> Virt-Factory is different from other management apps in a few key 
> areas.   We use the concept of Profiles to say what a machine does.    
> This integrates systems management (Puppet) with the provisioning 
> process (Cobbler) all in one easy step -- and all controlled with a 
> very simple user interface.    Administrators can create (or import) 
> profiles, assign them to existing machines, and share them with other 
> virt-factory users.   ISVs could also create profiles for commercial 
> software.  Basically, profiles are a lightweight way of building 
> software appliances.  
> Future releases will also concentrate heavily on batch management, 
> such as finding good candidates to migrate virtual machines to when 
> taking a physical host offline, or doing interesting things with 
> tagging and reporting.   So, by integrating systems management tools 
> in with good batch management solutions, we'll have a unique (and 
> free) solution
> for doing a lot of interesting things around virtualization management.
>
> This particular release adds several new things:
>
> -- More streamlined setup process 
> (http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com/vf-install-setup.php)
> -- User interface is now rethemed and improved -- (thanks to Máirín 
> Duffy for help on this)
> -- The server now sets up and runs PostgreSQL automatically -- as 
> opposed to sqlite
> -- Changes to work with newer builds of Puppet
> -- Localization framework (though no included translations yet)
> -- Lots of code/architectural cleanup and bugfixes
>
> Our plans for future releases are detailed here:  
> http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com/vf-roadmap.php
>
> Keep in mind this project is still getting off the ground somewhat, so 
> it's not quite ready for production use.  The next release (0.0.4) 
> will address a lot of those critical features.
> If you have comments, questions, or ideas ... as usual, we'd love to 
> hear them.   Check out http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com, email us 
> here, or stop by on IRC.    We have a channel #virt-factory on 
> irc.freenode.net.
>
> Downloads are here:  http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com/download.php
>
> Thanks!
>
> Michael DeHaan
> Adrian Likins
> Scott Seago
>
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I also forgot to credit the following folks for help on 0.0.3:

Thanks to...

Kevin Smith
Jeff Ortel
Jesus Rodriguez

Appreciate the help, guys :)






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