In a nutshell

Archipel is a solution to manage and supervise virtual machines. No matter if you have a few locally on your computer or thousands through data centers, Archipel is a central solution to manage them all. You can perform all basic virtualization commands and many other things like live migration, VMCasts, packages, etc.

Real time

Archipel uses XMPP for all communication. There is no webservice or custom protocol. You just need at least one XMPP server — like eJabberd — to start playing with it. This allows Archipel to work completely real time. You never have to refresh the user interface. You'll be notified as soon as something happens. You can even use your favorite chat clients to command your infrastructure. Isn't it great to be able to open a chat conversation with your virtual machine and say things like "How are you today?" or "Hey, please reboot"?

Virtual machines on Demand

All your virtual machines in one place

All hypervisor's virtual machines are displayed into one place. You can see their current state, name and company related informations. You can create or remove new ones with a single click. If you have dozens of VMs, you can simply filter them.

Name generation

Lack of inspiration? you don't know how to name these 10 virtual machines? Let Archipel do it. It will use one random poetic name elected from the list of all known Asteroids of the solar system.

Import

You already have some existing Libvirt domains you would like to manage with Archipel? No problem. Archipel will detect existing virtual machines you can manage them in a non-destructive way with a single click.

Health care

Real time statistics

With Archipel you are aware of the the health of your hypervisors in real-time. Memory usage, CPU load, CPU time, free disk space, load average or total amount swapped memory, everything is right here.

Logs

The Archipel Server's logs of physical machines are also available from the Health module. If you see a usage peak, you can easily try to figure out why, using filtering.

Built-in VNC client

VNC anytime, anywhere

Archipel includes a VNC client right from one of its module. You can control your virtual machine's screens. If your virtual machine is a graphical terminal (Linux Xorg or Windows), you can use your mouse right from your browser to do anything you want, just like you were in front of a real computer.

JavaScript awesomeness

This VNC client uses only Javascript. You don't need any plugin to run it. Archipel was one of the first project using noVNC as a screen viewer. It is now widely used. Try it, you'll see why.

The retail store

Pick-up

In this module, you manually build your virtual machine. Three CPUs, 2GiB of RAM, one drive, two network cards etc. you pick up what you need.

And plug

You can decide what type of media or device you plug in your virtual computer. An install DVD of Linux or Windows, a virtual drive, a network card you plug in a defined hypervisor's network, you decide which device you add.

Here are your VMs, Sir

Register to existing VMCasts

VMCast are some RSS feeds containing virtual machines. With Archipel, you can register to these VMCasts, download and use already packaged appliances (including drives and configuration).

Package

You have made an awesome virtual machine you would like to save or share? That's not a problem. Each hypervisor has its own VMCast feed and can package any of its virtual machines. These packages will then be available for registred user of the VMCast.

Keep control

Play, Pause, Stop

Archipel provides you with all controls you can imagine for a particular virtual machine. You can start, stop, shutdown, unplug, pause, resume a virtual machine with a single click. Archipel is also smart enough to take into account all external events. If you stop a VM with virsh, controls will be updated right into Archipel.

Migration

Maintenance needed on a Hypervisor? No problem, just double click on any available hypervisor to migrate your running VM to a new host without any service interruption.

Permissions

You, in! You, you're out!

Archipel has a very precise permissions management system. From just being allowed to see hypervisors or virtual machines, to total control over them, you can decide what a user can do. You can also create shared groups combining users, virtual machines and hypervisors to build data-center "zones".

Roles

You can create roles. A role is a template of permissions. You can even apply many roles to a user in a row. A new role is published ona PubSub, and all adminstrators can use it for their data center "zones".

Networking made easy

Route, NAT, isolation. You decide

The hypervisor's network module allows you to split your network into segments in no time and add virtual machines into them. Network can be in NAT mode or in a routed mode.

DHCP and address reservation

You can define several range of IP adresses virtual machines will use. You can also resrve some to given hostname or MAC address.

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