To date, the only serious options for managing large-scale, spread-out Virtual Machine infrastructures has been to either roll your own management tools or to invest in VMWare's comprehensive VirtualCenter products. Microsoft, as usual, has been late to the virtualization party and whatever they come up with will probably only work with their VMs and perhaps those of the market leader who they will be trying to bring down; and Xen, although recently acquired by Citrix, has suffered from the traditional bottom-up approach of open-source projects in considering primarily the technical, rather than the operational, issues of virtualization.

Today I ran across an interesting new open-source offering, however, Enomalism, which promises to break that trend and provide a web-based, platform-agnostic VM management tool.

Enomalism has fairly close affiliations with XenSource so it's no surprise that support for Xen VMs seems to be strongest, but the company promises support for other popular platforms soon. The company seems to be aiming primarily at supporting SaaS providers, but their product is just as applicable to the enterprise, with far-flung and diverse virtual infrastructures.

Particularly interesting are the product's add-on capabilities... one allows migration of VM images between Enomalism and Amazon's EC2, providing an intriguing range of possibilities for dealing on the fly with outages such as last week's at Amazon, or simply easing deployment and scaling issues. Another allows the use of Amazon's S3 service, via ElasticDrive, for integrated storage. This sort of flexibility is sorely lacking in most commercial offerings, and provided the execution is adequate (which is often the down-side with open-source packages), Enomalism could provide an excellent alternative for managing your virtual infrastructure.