Hi,
This new offering looks really interesting. Though its still a bit 'cloudy' to me what it actually entails. In the initial marketing blurb, i find only few details:
"With Cloudmin, you can create and manage virtualized server instances using Xen, Zones, vservers, and Amazon EC2 technologies."
That sounds good, so how does it work? Is it something like the proprietary Linode control panel Or is it something which allows you to easily build a service like the VPS Cloud offering. Or is it something altogether different?
I guess you guys didn't have the time yes to be more specific, due to the huge effort in setting up the new website. It would be nice to have a Cloudmin feature list, some screen shots and a demo site. Is Cloudmin being used in production anywhere yet?
Christian
That sounds good, so how does it work? Is it something like the proprietary Linode control panel Or is it something which allows you to easily build a service like the VPS Cloud offering. Or is it something altogether different?
Yes! ;-)
It is all of those things. But, mostly it's for you guys. We do plan to launch a simple EC2 management front-end to simplify Virtualmin deployment on AWS for folks who want Virtualmin on EC2 but don't know how to get started, but that's a side project. Just a fun thing to tinker with. We primarily want to help folks build cloud services from scratch, via a nice control panel, a simple to use API, and integration with all of our other projects and products.
We don't plan to compete with Linode (or Slicehost, or Joyent, or RimuHosting, etc.). We think they're doing a great job and providing cool services. But we do think there's room for a thousand flowers to bloom in the cloud computing industry, and we'd like to help folks build them. We like building the tools, we'll let others build the services.
In short, Cloudmin is an installable product, just like Virtualmin. You buy it, install it, and then build something awesome with it. You can even put your logo on it, and act like we didn't have nothing to do with it, but if you're real nice we'll mention you on our Twitter and let you post about it in the Third-Party news forum, and such.
Is Cloudmin being used in production anywhere yet?
Yes, it is. It has been in private beta with about a dozen companies for the past 6 months or so. I won't name names, but folks can talk about it if they like. We've also been using it for managing all of our machines for about a year. It's actually pretty battle-tested at this point. All of our demo server instances, for example, are Cloudmin managed instances, as are all of our test systems (if you have a look at the Virtualmin compatibility list, you'll know we have a lot of test systems).
It's still new, and it's still got bugs (I'm sure!), and it's still got a long way to go before we consider it the perfect cloud computing management platform (but I think we're as close as anyone else at this point, and we're moving pretty fast), but it's a very useful product for a pretty broad array of problems. We're focusing on hosting for the short-term, as we know hosting providers better than we know enterprise, but there's a lot of data centers out there crying out to be merged into the cloud...we'd like to help out in that effort.
It would be nice to have a Cloudmin feature list, some screen shots and a demo site.
All coming soon. I'm moving as fast as possible on all of these things. Cloudmin is getting it's own site, actually (though it'll be a simple splash and docs site, and the forums and tickets will remain here).
The migration beat me up pretty good, but I'm back to full steam ahead (mostly), so we'll be adding new stuff every day, including stuff about Cloudmin.
Oh, yeah, Cloudmin is the product formerly known as VM2. The name Cloudmin has remained top secret throughout the beta. (Even we didn't know the real name until just a couple of months ago.) ;-)
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Hello,
Beat buys the soft, and I install it...
We are using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on our servers: is it possible to run Cloudmin on that distribution ? (even if your install script say not to do that ).
Do you have some doc, even draft, on Cloudmin ?
Thank you, Guy.
Yes, we've just added new download links. One is a Generic installer, which uses wbm files and installs on most distros without modification. I just realized though that there's one more update needed to the serial numbers page to accommodate all types of Cloudmin. Fixing that now. Jamie sent me links for the other install scripts, so it should take long.
Pretty comprehensive docs are written, but unfortunately not imported yet. I'm working on it and hope to launch Cloudmin.com early tomorrow, which will include the full docs.
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Hi,
Do you have a billing system integrated that we are able to bill per usage ?
regards eric
Does Virtualmin offer a billing system? No.
However, a lot of folks around here really seem to like WHMCS for that:
http://www.whmcs.com/
Currently, that just works for Virtualmin, and not Cloudmin.
However, there's some discussion over there about building in Cloudmin support into their billing software.
If you're interested in that, I might suggest politely offering your input to the folks over there -- you could email Matt (the primary developer) directly using the contacts on their website, or you could chime in using their forum.
-Eric
Yes, please chime in here where i started a poll/request for cloudmin support.
http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?t=21308
I just opened WHMCS, and when setting up a server, Cloudmin is there in the dropdown for server type.
Nice work, guys!