Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. Overview
1.2. Prerequisites
1.3. Types of Users
1.3.1. Open Source Developers
1.3.2. Users

oVirt is the next step in Red Hat's Virtualization platform for any application, anywhere, anytime because it provides a simple yet powerful way to manage virtual machines. With the enormous flexibility and choice that the Red Hat Virtualization platform affords, you need an easy, visual way of managing virtual machines (VMs) that could be running thousands of software applications, deployed in a myriad ways, using different operating systems and hardware platforms.

From running a few VMs on a single host to managing thousands of VMs over hundreds of hosts on a network, oVirt makes virtualization easy and scales to meet your needs. Manage and administer oVirt with the oVirt Server Suite User Interface (also called the oVirt UI) that runs on any platform with a web browser that can authenticate with a kerberos server.

1.1. Overview

oVirt allows centralized management of your computing environment, reducing the costs of management of the infrastructure and allowing people to focus on their core tasks instead of the infrastructure itself.

The oVirt host image is a small, stateless Fedora build that can run from a flash drive, a CDROM, or entirely in RAM via PXE. It enables users to manipulate virtual machines, provides a secure authenticated channel (GSSAPI/SASL2) for remote access and allows easy management and allocation of storage. oVirt has several components:

  • A host browser and status update daemon that keeps the oVirt database in sync with the available hosts and virtual machines on the network, updating the oVirst database when new hosts appear, old hosts disappear, and VMs change their status;

  • A task engine that reads a task queue from the oVirt database and makes appropriate libvirt calls, updating the database on the success or failure of those tasks;

  • A monitoring agent that receives performance data from oVirt hosts and stores it for display in the user interface;

  • An appliance that allows users to manage virtual machines, view usage and performance, manage hosts and storage servers, manage user permissions, and perform many other management tasks.