About xvpappliance™
xvpappliance is a small self-contained virtual machine, that can be imported into XenServer or Xen Cloud Platform. It includes xvp, xvpdiscover, xvpviewer and xvpweb pre-installed, and has a menu-driven interface allowing all of these to be configured easily. It has built in scheduling facilities for checking for software updates and changes in pool memberships.
Users can manage virtual machines by pointing their web browser at the imported appliance. The administrator of the appliance can reconfigure it, as necessary, via a simple menu driven interface, that can be accessed from the xvpappliance console or via ssh.
For most people, installing xvpappliance will probably be much simpler than building, installing and configuring the individual components separately.
You can download xvpappliance as a complete virtual machine in XVA format. Alternatively, you can build your own appliance from the various components.
Features:
- Users can manage virtual machines from a web browser on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows or iOS
- The appliance can be configured from its console, or via ssh, using a simple menu-driven program
- Users can access VM consoles (except from iOS), perform VM power operations, live-migrate VMs and manage DVD drives
- Users can create and delete snapshots of their VMs and revert a VM to a snapshot.
- The administrator can restrict any user to managing a particular pool, group of VMs in a pool, or a single VM
- The administrator can restrict the operations a user can perform (e.g. just allowing console access)
- User passwords can be defined locally, or use Active Directory (or other LDAP-based directory servers)
- A single appliance can manage VMs in multiple XenServer and/or Xen Cloud Platform pools
- Standalone server hosts not in pools are managed as single-host pools
- Changes to the state of individual VMs is shown in quasi real time in the web interface
- The appliance can be configured to poll pools to automatically discover VM additions and removals
- VM consoles use a VNC-based Java applet with behind-the-scenes one-time passwords for enhanced security
Limitations:
The appliance does not support all the possible configuration options of the individual components, nor all the features of applications like XenCenter. In the current release, the following features are not available:
- Accessing consoles other than via web interface: standalone xvpviewer or other VNC viewers cannot be used
- Creation of quiesced (VSS-based) snapshots or live memory snapshots: only disk snapshots are implemented
- Other facilities available in XenCenter, e.g. creating, deleting, exporting and importing virtual machines
Related manual pages:
Comparison with XenServer Web Self Service:
| xvpappliance 1.15 | webss 1.1.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Appliance operating system | CentOS 5 64-bit | CentOS 5 32-bit |
| Appliance web server | Standard Apache 2.2 | Custom Python 2.6 |
| Supported XenServer versions | 5.5 or later | 5.6 or later |
| Supported Xen Cloud Platform versions | 0.1 or later | ✗ |
| Active Directory (AD) Integration | ✓ (via Apache) | ✓ (via XenServer) |
| In-situ operating system and application updates support | ✓ | ✗ |
| Role based access control | ✓ (with/without AD) | ✓ (only with AD) |
| Group virtual machines for access control | ✓ | ✗ |
| Live migrate virtual machines between server hosts | ✓ | ✗ |
| Create, delete and revert to virtual machine snapshots | ✓ | ✗ |
| Boot and resume virtual machines on specific server hosts | ✓ | ✗ |
| Boot virtual machines in recovery mode | ✓ | ✗ |
| Also available as separate open source components | ✓ | ✗ |