I would like to set up my own in-house website with virtual hosts that has a easy to use tool to manage everything. Is there an open source alternative to cpanel. I have found two of which one looks like it has not been supported in years and the other vhcs I know nothing about. Any Suggestions would be appreciated.

Not sure what cpannel is.

Linux has "virtual" host options. In Fedora/RedHat/CentOS you can use Xen virtual setup. Or you can install VMWare as the base OS which allows you to create virtual machines on top of it.

From your question it sounds like Cpannel isn't really separate virtual hosts at all but rather a logical separation of web sites into cordoned off areas. For that you might want to look at creating separate "chroot jails" for each web site on the same host.

Someone more knowledgeable about web technologies may have a better answer.

You may like webmin;
http://www.webmin.com/
and for ubuntu;
http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/
Virtual Hosts Settings
http://linux.about.com/od/ubusrv_doc/a/ubusg25t06.htm

For the closed environment, the system will be in, chroot probably will not be necessary yet. I was looking for a way to easily manage all the sites more than just setting them up. I probably need to go back and look at webmin a bit closer for starters.

How many virtual hosts are you likely to want, and how often will you add more? To add these manually into apache's conf file is pretty straightforward.

I am not sure yet but howtoforge reminded of a program called ispconfig. I had heard of it but forgot about it. I thnk it will fit the bill.
Thanx everyone!!!

virtual hosts are simple to create by directly editing the httpd.conf
check out : http://sunspikes.com/oss/archives/6

I don't know of a cpanel like product for managing multiple virtual websites but a google search for cpanel download broght up some free download sites. Some even offered a 'free' trial for cpanel.