Hyper Management

The Open Source community has delivered some of the finest virtualization technologies in the world, including the Xen and KVM hypervisors, various powerful APIs, and interfaces such as Libvirt. But thus far, no open source project has produced a really well-designed cross-hypervisor management tool for virtualized environments. The few candidates have either been restricted to a specific interface, such as the Virt-manager [1] X11 application, or they have been highflying tools with Cloud aspirations, such as Xen’s Enomalism [2], which is over the top for normal hypervisor administration work.

What administrators are increasingly looking for is an intuitive web GUI capable of providing centralized and complete management for thousands of virtual machines from the whole zoo of available systems: Xen, through KVM, through VMware. Enter Archipel [3], with its fresh, new approach: The small team of French developers claims to want to do a better job than Enomalism or Proxmox [4] and delves deeply into the open source toolbox to do so.