oVirt is a free, open-source

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

management platform. It was founded by

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

s, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

, PowerPC64 and

s390x S39 may refer to: Aviation * Blériot-SPAD S.39, a French reconnaissance aircraft * Letov Š-39, a Czechoslovakian sport aircraft * Prineville Airport, in Crook County, Oregon, United States * Sikorsky S-39, an American flying boat Other us ...

architecture are the only

hypervisor A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) or virtualizer, is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

s supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.

Architecture

oVirt consists of two basic components, oVirt engine and oVirt node. The oVirt engine backend is written in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, while the frontend is developed with GWT web toolkit. The oVirt engine runs on top of the WildFly (former JBoss)

application server An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. For a typical web application, the application server sits behind the web servers. An application ser ...

. The frontend can be accessed through a webadmin portal for administration, or a user portal with privileges, and features that can be fine tuned. User administration can be managed locally or by integrating oVirt with

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed Directory service, directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...

or AD services. The oVirt engine stores data in a

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

Data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business intelligence, reporting and data analysis and is a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central Re ...

and reporting capabilities depend on additional history and reports databases that can be optionally instantiated during the setup procedure. A

REST API REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

is available for customizing or adding engine features. An oVirt node is a server running RHEL,

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a discontinued Linux distribution that provided a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream (softw ...

, Scientific Linux, or experimentally

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

, with KVM hypervisor enabled and a VDSM (Virtual Desktop and Server Manager)

daemon A demon is a malevolent supernatural being, evil spirit or fiend in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology and folklore. Demon, daemon or dæmon may also refer to: Entertainment Fictional entities * Daemon (G.I. Joe), a character ...

written in Python. Management of resources initiated from a webadmin portal are sent through the engine backend that issues appropriate calls to the VDSM daemon. VDSM controls all resources available to the node (compute, storage, networking) and virtual machines running on it and is also responsible for providing

feedback Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause and effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handle ...

to the engine about all initiated operations. Multiple nodes can be clustered from the oVirt engine webadmin portal to enhance RAS. The oVirt engine can be installed on a standalone server, or can be hosted on a cluster of nodes themselves inside a virtual machine (self-hosted engine). The self-hosted engine can be manually installed or automatically deployed via a

virtual appliance A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that ...

. oVirt is built upon several other projects including libvirt,

Gluster Gluster Inc. (formerly known as Z RESEARCH) was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an engineer ...

, PatternFly, and

Ansible The term ''ansible'' refers to a category of fictional technological devices capable of superluminal Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than ...

Features

Virtual datacenters, managed by oVirt, are categorized into storage, networking and clusters that consist of one or more oVirt nodes.

Data integrity Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance of, data accuracy and consistency over its entire Information Lifecycle Management, life-cycle. It is a critical aspect to the design, implementation, and usage of any system that stores, proc ...

is ensured by

fencing Fencing is a combat sport that features sword fighting. It consists of three primary disciplines: Foil (fencing), foil, épée, and Sabre (fencing), sabre (also spelled ''saber''), each with its own blade and set of rules. Most competitive fe ...

, with agents that can use various resources such as baseboard management controllers or uninterruptible power supplies. Storage is organized within entities called storage domains and can be local or shared. Storage domains can be created using the following storage solutions or protocols: * NFS *

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

compliant filesystem * GlusterFS Network management allows defining multiple

VLAN A virtual local area network (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer ( OSI layer 2).IEEE 802.1Q-2011, ''1.4 VLAN aims and benefits'' In this context, virtual refers to a ...

s that can be bridged to the network interfaces available on the nodes. Configuration of bonded interfaces,

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

es,

subnet A subnet, or subnetwork, is a logical subdivision of an IP network. Updated by RFC 6918. The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting. Computers that belong to the same subnet are addressed with an identica ...

masks and gateways on managed nodes are all supported within webadmin portal interface, as is SR-IOV on hardware configurations that support this feature. Management features for compute resources include CPU pinning, defining NUMA topology, enabling

kernel same-page merging In computing, kernel same-page merging (KSM), also known as kernel shared memory, memory merging, memory deduplication, and page deduplication is a kernel feature that makes it possible for a hypervisor system to share memory pages that have id ...

, memory over-provisioning, HA VM reservation etc. Virtual machine management enables selecting high availability priority, live migration, live snapshots, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, creating virtual machine templates, using cloud-init for automated configuration during provisioning and deployment of virtual machines. Supported

guest operating system Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization emulates the hardw ...

s include

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

. Access to virtual machines can be achieved from webadmin portal using

SPICE In the culinary arts, a spice is any seed, fruit, root, Bark (botany), bark, or other plant substance in a form primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of pl ...

, VNC and

RDP RDP may refer to: Computing * Ramer–Douglas–Peucker algorithm, an algorithm for polygonal simplification * Recombination detection program, for analysing genetic recombination * Recursive descent parser, a type of top-down parser * Remote Desk ...

protocols. oVirt can be integrated with many open source projects, including

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...

Glance and

Neutron The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , that has no electric charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. The Discovery of the neutron, neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, leading to the discovery of nucle ...

for disk and network provisioning, Foreman/Katello for VM/node provisioning or pulling relevant errata information into webadmin portal and can be further integrated with ManageIQ for a complete virtual infrastructure lifecycle management.

Disaster recovery IT disaster recovery (also, simply disaster recovery (DR)) is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle. DR employs policies, tools, ...

features include the ability to import any storage domain into different oVirt engine instances and replication can be managed from oVirt with GlusterFS geo-replication feature, or by utilizing synchronous/asynchronous block level replication provided by storage hardware vendors. oVirt engine

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "wikt:back ...

s can be automated and periodically transferred to a remote location. oVirt supports hyper-converged infrastructure deployment scenarios. Self-hosted engine and

-based storage domains allow centralized management of all resources that can be seamlessly expanded, simply by adding an appropriate number of nodes to the cluster, without having any single points of failure. oVirt provides deep integration with Gluster, including Gluster specific performance improvements.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:OVirt Free software for cloud computing Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Red Hat software Virtualization software for Linux

Architecture

Features

See also

References

External links