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 use all libvirt-supported virtualization engines like KVM, Xen, OpenVZ or VMWare. 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"?

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 is also available in from the Health module. If you see a usage pick, you can easily try to figure out why, using filtering.

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 JID. You can create or remove new ones with a single click. If you have dozens of VMs, you can simply filter them.

Cloning

One click is the only thing you need to duplicate a virtual machine.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Pick

In this module, you manually build your virtual machine. Three CPUs, 2Go or RAM, one drives, 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.