Convirture Adds Hyper-V Support to Management Tool
Convirture, which provides a management platform and console for virtual servers and cloud infrastructure, said its solution now supports Microsoft's Hyper-V.
The new release of the company's namesake Convirt Enterprise lets IT pros and administrators provision and manage Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines. Convirt Enterprise had already supported VMware, KVM and Xen hypervisor platforms. It can also manage VMs running in various cloud services, namely Amazon Web Services EC2 as well as those compatible with OpenStack and Eucalyptus Private Clouds.
But before the latest release of Hyper-V (included in Windows Server 2012 R2 last fall, Convirture didn't believe Hyper-V was suited for large-scale virtualization environments. Prior to the latest release of Hyper-V, Convirture also didn't see many IT organizations using it in large-scale datacenter environments, said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of the San Mateo, Calif.-based company.
"We were a little surprised that Hyper-V took this long to start showing up, but there were some legitimate concerns around it and I'm talking about bread and butter hypervisor features," Farooq said. "Since Microsoft shipped Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V has now become real enough that that the cost advantage and the push Microsoft is putting behind it, is starting to gain traction."
Farooq said Convirt Enterprise will appeal to shops running Hyper-V that require more functionality than the Hyper-V Manager Microsoft offers. Yet for those that need to manage multiple hypervisor platforms or require centralized management of multiple VMs and hosts, he said it's a fraction of the cost of Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager.
"Hyper-V Manager is a great tool for small scale management of a few hosts, maybe," he said. "But if you want to go beyond that, if you want to do more capable management, more sophisticated management, you have to go into a full centralized management suite. Now you can have a pretty sizeable Hyper-V environment without having to take on all this conceptual overhead of System Center's networking model and configuration."
Convirt Enterprise provides centralized management in a Web-based console and generates historical metrics, creates VM scheduling and provides self-service provisioning, he added. It costs $449 per single-socket host. Existing customers will receive a free update with the new Hyper-V support. It doesn't support Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service but he indicated the company has it in its roadmap.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/2014 at 10:27 AM