Building on its open source software offering, Convirture has introduced ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise edition with add-ons of specific interest to enterprises like advanced automation and scalability features for running large-scale or mission-critical virtualized environments.

It brings new viability to managing open source hypervisors, like Xen and KVM, with features intended to deliver equivalent function to VMware's vCenter -- at much lower cost.

The founder and CEO, Arsalan Farooq, says: "Until now, any organization that wanted a complete solution for managing and automating a virtual data center was locked into expensive and proprietary solutions like VMware vCenter. That changes today as ConVirt 2.0's advanced automation, private cloud management, enterprise scalability and datacenter integration features now meet or exceed what's available from proprietary platform vendors. Now, organizations considering Xen or KVM as open source alternatives to commercial virtualization platforms are no longer forced to compromise on manageability."

The open source version of ConVirt has been available for more than three years and is broadly deployed and well-tested in real-world data centers -- having been downloaded more than 30,000 times. In fact, ConVirt1.x is included in most major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Debian and others.

A beta user of the ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise software, Steven Scoleri, who is principal architect at GSI Commerce, a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services, said: "We've implemented a variety of virtualization platforms over the years and managing them all - especially the open source hypervisors - has always been the single biggest pain point. Our beta test of ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise has gone very well and we think it just may be the game-changer we've been looking for. We no longer need experts on hand at all times to complete simple virtualization tasks. We look forward to further exploring ConVirt's capabilities and using it to manage our entire open source-based virtual data center."

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is available immediately direct from Convirture.  Pricing starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts, with volume pricing available for larger environments. A "per virtual machine" pricing package is also available for ISP's and hosting providers. More information is available at http://www.convirture.com/contact.html.