[et-mgmt-tools] Announcing virt-factory 0.0.1

[Michael DeHaan]

Today we're pleased to announce the first public release of a new 
systems management project -- virt-factory -- currently at bright, new, 
and shiny version 0.0.1.    Virt-factory is a project that aims to 
manage very large numbers of virtual machines in a very managable way.   
As it's a very new project, there is a lot of room for developers who 
are interested to get involved.
We want this to be very much a community project.   Check out the web 
site at http://virt-factory.et.redhat.com for more info, and perhaps 
also look at the Roadmap (http://et.redhat.com/page/VF_Roadmap) to see 
where we'd like to take it.

===

 From the website:

Virt-Factory manages virtualized infrastructure:

   * it focuses on interacting with large numbers of virtual systems
     and on addressing some of the interaction problems that brings with it
   * it is primarily aimed at a fairly formal setting (data center),
     though we hope it is useful on smaller scales, too
   * even though it has some uses for bare-metal systems, it is first
     and foremost a tool for managing virtual systems, and future
     development will be much more focused on virtual systems than
     bare-metal systems

     Virt-Factory provides both a web UI, for ease of use, and an
     XMLRPC API, for scripting of admin actions.

     Virt-Factory is built on open-source projects including Cobbler
     http://cobbler.et.redhat.com, libvirt http://libvirt.org, and
     Puppet http://reductivelabs.com.

     Today, Virt-Factory provisions and manages hosts and guests, and
     addresses some of the problems specific to virtual systems: it creates
     complete host and guest images from metadata descriptions and
     centrally manages existing images.

     Future work will make it possible to abstract away individual
     hosts and place guests into a pool of equivalent hosts,
     simplifying the administrator's view of the data center for many
     tasks.

===

et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com is the project mailing list... and we already 
have a git code repository up at the URL above, plus a yum repository, 
tarballs, and so forth.  
Questions, comments, ideas?    We'd be glad to hear from you.

Sincerely,

The Virt Factory Team
Development:  Michael DeHaan, Adrian Likins, Scott Seago
Lots of Help From:  David Lutterkort, Jim Meyering, and the rest of the 
Red Hat Emerging Technologies group