When should we expect to see Virtualmin Pro available?

Yes, Please -- When? And Pricing??? I'm pricing dedicated serv ers right now due to data center issues and this is my chance to wean my partner off cpanel. But I need to know more ASAP.

I do believe details like pricing and when it will be available are being worked out.

On availability. Virtualmin Pro will be available when it is a commercial grade product. It is not like the GPL virtualmin where it can be released with minor bugs that the users can be expected to work out on their systems. Virtualmin Pro has to be tested on a variety of systems and operating systems before they can release. It is important to be patient. In the meantime I reccomend you work with the GPL Virtualmin as it is a quality product and I expect it will be easily upgraded to Virtualmin Pro.

You can get the GPL Virtualmin from www.webmin.com.

You can learn some useful information on virtualmin at http://www.swelltech.com/support/virtual-servers/index.html. Also you can get your learn on webmin at http://www.swelltech.com/support/webminguide/index.html.

I understand the need for it to be heavily tested, however I would still like to get a target date that the Pro version will be available.

I'm glad to hear how excited everyone is to get their hands on the Professional version! (I'll be excited to get it out the door!)

I will be distributing a beta version of the installer to all sponsors tonight. It is expected to work well on Fedora Core 3 and 4, and RHEL (and derivatives like CentOS) 3 and 4. SuSE and Mandriva will come in the next day or two, and Debian and Ubuntu will follow as soon as possible after that. The ones that lack package management (FreeBSD and Gentoo) will take a bit longer, but they are also on the agenda.

I have finally rounded up a contractor to assist me with the ecommerce portion of the website, and he believes we can have the software registration process up and running before the end of the week--so we'll have a few days to work with the early users to make sure all of the bugs are worked out before it goes on sale.

Pricing will be very competitive with the current virtual host administration tools on the market, and the bundle will include just about everything (where our competitors charge extra for things like script installers).

Throwing in the extras is a good marketing plan. I've grown tired of paying more for them when I can install them myself in little more time than it takes to run the scripts.

I don't know if anyone has expressed a need for it, but is Slackware 10.1 expected to be supported?

Hi Jeromy,

We've had no customers asking for slack, so far. I'm not opposed to it, as we hope to address as many platforms as is economically feasible. Slack doesn't have very good package management (ala yum/apt-get/up2date/urpmi) but we have to solve that problem for FreeBSD and Gentoo (which we have had some pretty vocal requests for) so there's no reason we can't solve it in the same way for Slackware.

I haven't actually solved the problem for FreeBSD or Gentoo, however, so it's hard to estimate exactly when Virtualmin Professional will be available on the non-package manager platforms.

There is a poll going on here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/vote

You can vote for what OS you'd most like to see Virtualmin Professional on. We are paying attention, and the results of the polls, plus the feedback we get from early adopters, will dictate where we go with the product.

In the short term, our OS support list, in order of appearence over the next few days/weeks, looks like this:

Fedora
RHEL/CentOS
SuSE
Mandriva
FreeBSD
Debian
Gentoo
Ubuntu
...whatever comes after...

I'd like to have all of these rolling out the door by the end of the month, though some of them might prove more difficult than I anticipate.

We will be focusing on the latest couple of releases of each OS, so that we don't have to commit to maintaining support for very old systems, especially since there are a few packages that we have to provide ourselves and can't be pulled directly frmo the vendor.

Hope this answers your questions.

I suppose I should also note that if you're bold enough, you can make Virtualmin run on any OS that Webmin supports. We'll help as best we can, and we'll integrate as much of what is learned during the process into our installer as possible. It is entirely possible that if you've got some experience with your OS' inner workings, and some virtual hosting experience, you can jumpstart the support for your OS. We aren't going to fight you if you try to run it somewhere we don't support yet.

Joe, just wanted to make sure that I didn't get missed in the distribution of Virtualmin Pro beta. You mentioned that you were going to distribute it two nights ago.

Distributing a couple of nights ago was the plan, but the best laid plans...

Anyway, I ran into some dependency issues with my module RPMs, which led to it interrupting the installer. But the makemodulerpm.pl script has been fixed now, and the new packages actually work. I'm running the test installs now, and hope to send it out to the sponsors list in a couple/few hours before I hit the sack for the night.

I've also rounded up a great OpenACS developer to help me wrap up the shopping cart and software registration manager so that we can begin selling Virtualmin Professional by this weekend (I hope...I'm gonna have to go back to my day job pretty soon if we don't!).