Virt-Factory 0.0.2

Virt-Factory project manages virtualized infrastructure:
Virt-Factory focuses on interacting with large numbers of virtual systems and on addressing some of the interaction problems that brings with it
Virt-Factory is primarily aimed at a fairly formal setting (data center), though we hope it is also useful on smaller scales
While Virt-Factory has some uses for bare-metal systems, it is first and foremost a tool for managing virtual systems. Future development will be much more focused on virtual systems management than bare-metal.
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, libvirt, and Puppet.
Today, Virt-Factory provisions and manages hosts and guests. It also 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 administrators view of the data center for many tasks.
Whats It Run On?
It is being developed on FC-6. Well add support for FC-7 and RHEL-5 shortly.
How Stable Is It?
At this point, virt-factory an alpha level project that will probably eat your brane. However its getting better every day.
Whats the architecture look like?
Virt-factory provides a central server for managing virtual hosts and guests. The server exposes an XMLRPC API that is used by the Web UI, and can also be used by custom scripts. On Managed systems, a special "node daemon" is installed, which the central server communicates with over secure XMLRPC.
Who is the target user?
Developers who want to be involved in new systems management technology. Users wishing to run a large number of virtual systems that have a key interest in virtualization and system recipes / appliance concepts.
How is Virtualization used?
Virtualization plays a core role in virt-factory and is heavily integrated. The software takes care of the nuts and bolts and can entirely manage your virtualization, though logging into virtualization via xm and virsh is still supported. Virt-factory is about enablement of virtualization as a core systems-management strategy.
How do you treat appliances?
Appliances can be defined purely as metadata ("profiles") rather than binary blobs. The metadata describes the required virtual machines attributes (number of processors, memory etc), the base system installation (as a template data for the kickstart file), and the appliances "personality" as a puppet manifest. This makes it possible to distribute appliances easily, and allows end-users to adapt appliances to their needs while still being able to consume appliance updates.
Enhancements:
- This release concentrates on making the code more stable and easier to install/deploy.