Documentation

oVirt is still a moving target so we apologize if documentation is out of date. If you find a mistake, please send patches to ovirt-devel@redhat.com.

What is oVirt?

oVirt is an open, cross-platform virtualization management system. oVirt provides both a small image that runs on a host and provides virtualization services to VMs there, and also a web-based management console that lets you allocate and group hosts and storage, install and remove virtual machines, level resources across a large group of machines, and much more. oVirt is designed to scale from a small group of users with little need for access control and quota management, all the way up to hundreds or even thousands of hosts with robust control over grouping, permissions, and quotas.

The oVirt host image is a small, stateless Fedora build that is meant to run from a flash drive, a CDROM, or entirely in RAM via PXE. It is built around libvirt, the open source virtualization API, which provides tools to manipulate virtual machines, a secure authenticated channel (GSSAPI/SASL2) for remote access, and an API for managing and allocating storage. In addition the oVirt host image includes collectd for gathering performance statistics. The combination of libvirt and collectd means that a properly set-up remote management tool can securely handle all aspects of virtual machine management and monitoring on the oVirt host.

The oVirt management console also uses libvirt, along with a kerberos/LDAP server, for secure transport, monitoring, and management. It has several components:

A host browser that listens for oVirt hosts to advertise themselves and their capabilities over the network
A task engine that reads a task queue from a Postgresql database and makes the appropriate libvirt calls over the transport
A Rails-based web UI that allows users to manage virtual machines, view usage and performance statistics and graphs, group and ungroup hosts and storage servers, delegate groups of machines to other users, manage quota and SLA for groups of users and machines, and many other management capabilities.

oVirt is designed to be platform and architecture agnostic. The libvirt API allows control of virtual machines from any platform that can run libvirt; this list currently includes numerous flavors of Linux, Solaris, and Windows 2003 Server, among others. In addition the web UI is designed to work from any platform that can run a web browser and authenticate with a kerberos server. In addition, oVirt is designed to scale, using LDAP authentication and authorization and collectd for monitoring.

Getting started with oVirt

The installation instructions give you a step-by-step guide to downloading and installing the large management console disk image.

The build instructions give you a step-by-step guide for building all of the components from the source repositories using the latest stable code or the latest development head.

The Using the oVirt Server Suite Interface Guide (PDF) describes how to use the oVirt web interface to administer Nodes and virtual machines. This document generally lags behind the releases, so it should be current as of 0.95.

The oVirt Server Suite Installation Guide (PDF) describes how to install the oVirt Server. This documentation overlaps somewhat with the install instructions link above. Like the above document it lags behind a bit so it is current as of 0.95.