A few clarifications and some questions, please (lvm, ioband, 50+ instances etc).

Good questions. I especially liked the one about buying lots and lots of Cloudmin instances. ;-)

So, let's just run through all of these:

I just stumbled upon virtualmin.com and was so surprised by the new layout (drupal rocks!) and by the mighty Cloudmin! I usually only check webmin.com..

I agree about Drupal. I'm really enjoying working with it, and I don't even like PHP! But Drupal is a great project with a lot of great developers working on it. I love how little code I've had to write to build out lots of great services (and we have a half dozen additional services waiting in the wings until things settle down with the Cloudmin launch and site migration, etc.).

Webmin.com will soon be moving into the same stable of sites all running under the same Drupal instance, so it will be impossible to miss the news. We might have to leave the Webmin.com front page on SourceForge.net, because Webmin.com is ridiculously popular (two orders of magnitude more pageviews each day than Virtualmin.com), and Drupal on our modest hardware might choke with that kind of load.

Anyway, forums and ticket tracker will soon be shared between Webmin.com and Virtualmin.com.

Anyway, my main question here is.. what if I need to manage more than 50 VPS instances (scattered across some dedicated servers)? The price for the 50 Instances version is more than decent, but what if I need to manage 100 instances or 200?

That'd be awesome. I'll add a 100 instance license now (not much cheaper than the 50 instance pricing, but a wee bit). If you want more than that, email me. You'd be entering reseller territory and can get better pricing; particularly if you have any Virtualmin Professional licenses already, you'd almost certainly qualify for the reseller program.

So, assuming we manage to buy a version of Cloudmin that will fit our needs, how easily could I "import" the existing instances into Cloudmin? As I said before they're all xen paravirtualized guests (Centos 5 x86_64).

Should be quite easy. Importing of Xen guests has been around for at least a few months in Cloudmin (during private beta when it was still called VM2), and CentOS 5 is our primary testing and development platform.

If you have any problems, we'd be happy to work with you on straightening them out.

Other questions: 1. Does cloudmin support deploying xen para guests on lvm?

Next version has it. I saw Jamie check in this feature a few days ago. So, give it another few days, until after the new release comes out (Virtualmin 3.70 is coming within the next day or so, and soon after that the 2.7 of Cloudmin will roll out). Next version is actually quite a bit more awesome.

(btw check this http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ioband/wiki/dm-ioband it would be a cool feature in webmin/cloudmin)

Sounds very cool, but I'm hesitant to work with kernel patches. I ended up maintaining a kernel patch back in the dark ages (2001 through 2005) when I ran my previous company, and I'm definitely not a competent kernel hacker. While the patches appear well-maintained right now, it's impossible to know what state they'll be in next year. And, this is way more complex than the simple GRE decapsulation protocol patch I was working with. If they, or something like them, makes it into the core kernel or the standard Xen patch set, we'll support it. Otherwise, we just can't take on that kind of commitment outside of our area of expertise.

2. I already have my (custom) os images from which i install, can i use those?

Of course! Images used for creating new Xen instances are basically just Xen instances that aren't running, so they're very easy to work with. ;-)

3. Is there a trial version or a demo of cloudmin? people will want to see what they pay for.

Not yet, but it's coming. We also always offer a 45 day money back guarantee on everything we sell. But, in your case, you'll still want to wait until that LVM support arrives.

Congrats for Cloudmin!

Thanks! It's been a wild ride, so far (far more sales in the first couple of weeks than we'd planned for, so we're kinda running to catch up with new support demands, and all the new features and modifications those new Cloudmin users are asking for), but we're enjoying having a new and rapidly changing product again (Virtualmin and Webmin have been stable for so long that changes have to be backward compatible and never too dramatic; though we release so often that small changes can lead to big ones over just a few months, it's still nice to be able to change everything overnight).

One more vote for LVM.

Will we be able to resize partitions on LVM with Cloudmin?

I wouldnt think resizing the lvm's would be to easy because the guest OS would have to be aware of it as well.

In the next Cloudmin release it will be possible to resize LVMs that virtual systems use for their filesystems. However, doing this while the virtual system is running isn't supported yet - you need to shut it down, do the resize, then re-start it. I suppose it could be done for filesystems that are un-mounted within the virtual system though ..