Nimbula launches Director 1.0 public beta

Entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market in June 2010, the US startup Nimbula immediately caught a lot of attention because of its leadership team. Founded by two of the fathers of EC2 and other veterans from Amazon and VMware, the company also features the founder and former CEO of VMware, Diane Greene, among its board advisors.

The mission is to turn virtual infrastructures into fully featured private clouds, bringing in the capabilities and scalability that made EC2 the leading IaaS public cloud. This mission helped the team to raise over $20M in two rounds of investment, led by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and VMware.

Almost six months after a limited private beta with few selected customers, the company finally announced the first public beta of its flagship product, Director, which currently supports KVM and Xen only.

The product doesn’t have any strict hardware compatibility list. The only requirement is that the servers’ CPUs have Intel VT or AMD-V extensions and that the NICs are supported by drivers shipping with Debian Linux 5.0 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0

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Nimbula Director allows users to launch a suite of heterogenous virtual machines via a launch plan that facilitates the configuration of parameters describing how each virtual machine will run.

Access to virtual machines and other entities in the cloud infrastructure is regulated by an authorization system that offers user and object permissions.

Once launched, the VMs’s health status can be monitored via a GUI.

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