Today we present our inital software release. Virtomize 1.0.0 now sees the world.

Virtomize is now available to automate your virtual machine creation process.

Features

  • automated virtual machine creation
  • supporting debian 9/10, Centos 6/7, Ubuntu 16.04
  • Templating virtual machine configurations
  • automated cluster detection and configuration
  • user management
  • REST API

creation

Virtomize 1.0.0 allows you to create virtual machines under the following requirements:

  1. you have at least one network available (by default you have at least one when using VMWare)
  2. your network has a DHCP server to provide IP addresses
  3. your network provides access to the internet

while 1 and 3 are simple to fullfille the 2nd is not allways present. This will change in upcoming releases, namely 1.1.0 when adding the static provisioning feature that removes the 2nd requirement.

Fullfiling these requirements virtomize is able to create virtual machines by

  • providing all informations needed to install a virtual machine (CPU, RAM, Disk ,network and of course a name)
  • using a predefinded template which sets defaults for all this except the name that has to be provided

Installation

Since we are making things easy we also created a configuration detection for your cluster. After installing Virtomize you are asked for connection information to your cluster, like an url, a user and a password. Also we need a datastore and a folder for storing Virtomize specific data like ISO files. Don’t worry you dont have to use your administrative user. Our documentation provides a list of rights that are needed for Virtomize to work. We recommend to create a user having the minimum of rights on your cluster. After providing access information to your cluster our system detects the configuration and adjusts itself.

a hint about the datastore The datastore is used to store ISO files that are needed for the installation, because of this it should be available on all of your hosts. So don’t use a local datastore here.

Templates

Talking about templates, when installing Virtomize we create default templates for every operating system and network combination. We call this the single network templates. Of course you can change them to fit your needs. Also you can create templates by yourself, even more complex templates including multiple networks.

User management

Virtomize provides a user management allowing you to create users for specific use cases. For example only creating virtual machines without having permissions to change cluster specific settings.

This gives you the chance to reduce the workload of your IT department by creating users for self service.

REST

We are an automation solution and have a fully featured REST-API to be able to integrate as best and easy as possible into your processes.

Upcoming

That’s it about our 1.0.0 release. We will keep you up to date about the upcoming releases. The next release will be a patch release adding some minor stuff with 1.0.1. More on this topic comes soon in a follow up post.

Thank you for reading and see you in the Virtomize.