At work we have a fairly big Xen-based Virtual Infrastructure. I was asked to test OpenQRM to see if it could be easily integrated into the existing environment and used as a monitoring and provisioning tool.

OpenQRM is a very nice and powerful tool, and provides means for VM provisioning and life cycle management, it integrates with Nagios and has other interesting features like the Visual Cloud Designer that we'd liked to use.

Unfortunately, a transition of the existing virtual infrastructure to OpenQRM would not be exactly seamless, and we had to give up on this.

On the other end, the beta for Convirt 2.0 was out, with a Web 2.0 interface. My experiments with it were encouraging. Integration of existing Xen servers and VMs was seamless (almost 😉 this time. Things improved with the stable release, but there is still some work to do, and I am trying to contribute.

I am investing some time in trying to do useful things with it, and reporting bugs and impressions in the forums. In a few days I should contribute a (somehow pre-alpha, proof-of-concept, incomplete… yeah, yeah, it's a disclaimer!) template for everybody to test and improve.