oVirt Overview
This document is intended to give a high-level view of oVirt's moving parts. However oVirt is a rapidly moving target. If you find problems or inconsistencies in this document, please don't hesitate to report them to us.
oVirt parts and connections
oVirt consists of the following bits:
- A stripped-down Fedora build that installs and runs off a CD, a usb key, or a ramdisk (over PXE) on a physical host. The build contains all the necessary pieces to support hosting and managing virtual machines on the host.
- A web-based management UI application for oVirt hosts, users, and vms.
- The FreeIPA ldap/kerberos identity, policy, and audit application.
The bits above connect in the following ways:
- The FreeIPA application handles kerberos administration, authentication, and authorization for the entire app.
- An oVirt host image is provided with the application. On boot (via cdrom, flash drive, or PXE), the host image loads its keytab and kerberos configuration from the oVirt management application and announces itself.
- The oVirt management application authenticates with FreeIPA and can then communicate with the libvirtd running on each oVirt host via an encrypted SASL connection using the libvirt SASL infrastructure.
- An iSCSI target, running on any machine reachable from the oVirt host, provides disk storage for oVirt guests. The oVirt host will automatically make the storage targets on the iSCSI server it is configured for available for oVirt guest installs.
