OpenSVC was just ported to the FreeBSD platform. The little blurb in that announcement intrigued me so I went to the OpenSVC website and found this: OpenSVC is a 'service' manager, as in clustered service manager, designed for real-world heterogeneous datacenters and large-scale operations orchestrator (disaster recovery, for example). Services are collections of resources (virtual machine, ip, disk groups, filesystems, file synchronizations, and application launchers). Services can be started, stopped and queried for status, providing a consistent command set for wildly different service integration types. Service configurations, status and logs are pushed to a central database coupled to a web front-end (collector). Services can be administered using the stand-alone GPLv2 software stack deployed on the nodes (nodeware), or through the web-front end. Plus some UML-type graphics. Which is all neat, but I still don't understand: what does it do? Am I just being dense? What's the use case for this system?