oVirt is a free, open-source

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

management platform. It was founded by

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become a ...

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/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

s, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with

platform independent In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

access. KVM on

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors 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 (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

, while the frontend is developed with GWT web toolkit. The oVirt engine runs on top of the

WildFly WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is an application server written by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on mu ...

(former JBoss)

application server An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a ...

. The frontend can be accessed through a webadmin

portal Portal often refers to: *Portal (architecture), an opening in a wall of a building, gate or fortification, or the extremities (ends) of a tunnel Portal may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Gaming * ''Portal'' (series), two video games ...

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 or AD services. The oVirt engine stores data in a

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

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

and reporting capabilities depend on additional history and reports databases that can be optionally instantiated during the setup procedure. A REST API is available for customizing or adding engine features. An oVirt node is a

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

running RHEL,

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

, Scientific Linux, or experimentally

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

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

to the engine about all initiated operations. Multiple nodes can be clustered from the oVirt engine webadmin portal to enhance

RAS Ras or RAS may refer to: Arts and media * RAS Records Real Authentic Sound, a reggae record label * Rundfunk Anstalt Südtirol, a south Tyrolese public broadcasting service * Rás 1, an Icelandic radio station * Rás 2, an Icelandic radio sta ...

. 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 engine ...

, PatternFly, and

Ansible An ansible is a category of fictional devices or technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no d ...

Features

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

fencing Fencing is a group of three related combat sports. The three disciplines in modern fencing are the foil, the épée, and the sabre (also ''saber''); winning points are made through the weapon's contact with an opponent. A fourth discipline, ...

, 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 *

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 servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

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 both the system- and user-level application programming in ...

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 phys ...

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 connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es, subnet 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 Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''NUMA1'' gene. Interactions Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 has been shown to interact with PIM1, Band 4.1, GPSM2 G-protein-signaling modulator 2, also ca ...

topology, enabling kernel same-page merging, memory over-provisioning, HA VM reservation etc. Virtual machine management enables selecting high availability priority, live migration, live

snapshots Snapshot, snapshots or snap shot may refer to: * Snapshot (photography), a photograph taken without preparation Computing * Snapshot (computer storage), the state of a system at a particular point in time * Snapshot (file format) or SNP, a file ...

, 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 systems include

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

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

SPICE A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Spices a ...

, VNC and RDP protocols. oVirt can be integrated with many open source projects, including OpenStack Glance and

Neutron The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the atomic nucleus, nuclei of atoms. Since protons and ...

for disk and network provisioning,

Foreman __NOTOC__ A foreman, forewoman or foreperson is a supervisor, often in a manual trade or industry. Foreman may specifically refer to: *Construction foreman, the worker or tradesman who is in charge of a construction crew * Jury foreman, a head ju ...

/Katello for VM/node provisioning or pulling relevant errata information into webadmin portal and can be further integrated with

ManageIQ ManageIQ is an open source cloud management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project in 2014, and forms the basis for its CloudForms product. It allows centralized management of various virtualization, private cloud, public cl ...

for a complete virtual infrastructure lifecycle management.

Disaster recovery Disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle.It employs policies, tools, and procedures. Disaster recovery focuses on ...

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 Geo-replication systems are designed to provide improved availability and disaster tolerance by using geographically distributed data centers. This is intended to improve the response time for applications such as web portals. Geo-replication can b ...

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 "back up", ...

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