Abiquo 1.5 is here, it was announced today in conjuncture with our re-launch as a US based company. The first product to allow IT managers to automatically convert virtual machine images built for one hypervisor technology to any other hypervisor supported by the product, most significantly including VMWare to Hyper-V conversions, in a single drag-and-drop operation. This brings Abiquo significantly closer to its unique vision of delivering a platform for managing fully interoperable, vendor-neutral public and private clouds.
The Software allows IT operations managers, responsible for maintaining the hardware, to create and manage pooled computer resources, or Resource Clouds, from any servers virtualized by any supported hypervisor. This Resource Cloud can then be provisioned or sold to those that need it, the users of the IT resources. These consumers can then use Abiquo to create virtual datacenters through which they can deploy instantly bundled virtual servers, storage and other physical resource, and applications from public and private virtual image libraries. All through a highly visual drag-and-drop user interface.
“The Cloud computing market is saturated with technology hype and incomplete offerings that don’t deliver enterprises the practical Cloud management solutions they desperately need,” said Pete Malcolm, CEO, Abiquo. “In contrast with other vendors, Abiquo includes all the required components to provide immediate business benefits. For example, delegating virtual datacenter control provides a significant reduction to an IT organization’s workload and immediate user empowerment benefits, eliminating IT bottlenecks. In addition, Abiquo allows IT to maintain management and control of their IT infrastructure, achieve full elasticity of computing resources, and eliminate virtualization and Cloud vendor lock-in. Abiquo has been extensively tested by both the open source community and by early commercial adopters including Global 1000 enterprises.”
Abiquo’s Complete Solution
Key new features in Abiquo 1.5 include:
- Microsoft Hyper-V Support
- Automatic “drag and drop” VM conversion between all supported hypervisor types
- Auto-discover machine resources and manage existing live Virtual Machines
- Capture and store stateful Virtual Machines
“As enthusiastic users of the current Abiquo solution, we are excited to learn of the new features in version 1.5”, said Jordi Mas, CEO, Nexica, a leading European hosted infrastructure provider (www.nexica.com), “we are particularly impressed by the hypervisor conversion and automatic provisioning which will allow us to save significant time and resources”.
The new features build on the unique benefits Abiquo provides:
- Multi-tenancy with Delegated provisioning and management of Virtual Enterprises
- Enforceable Resource Limits to ensure risk-free operation
- Policy based Workload Management with automatic VM assignment
- Hypervisor agnostic, supporting VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and Virtual Box
- Image Libraries (public, shared and private) for VM images and bundled appliances
- Web-based graphical user interface with role-based context
- Fully supports open standards including OVF and Stream Optimized Format
“While server virtualization technologies are relatively mature, they do not provide the complete management infrastructure required to create a private cloud service,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. “A production oriented private or on-premise cloud architecture should have four key components: access management, service management, resource management and the underlying resource tier.”