As you enter the world of working with KVM, there is another tool you will likely hear about and see referenced. The tool is called oVirt. What is this tool, and what does it do? How does it interact with and work with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)? Let’s look and see.
What is oVirt?
First, let’s see what oVirt is exactly and what it does. It is an open-source platform with a centralized management interface for managing your virtualized infrastructure. It is built on top of KVM. With the oVirt management platform, you can manage all your virtual machines, storage, and networking using a single web-based interface.
How do you use oVirt with KVM?
You may wonder how you use oVirt and KVM together. The oVirt platform uses KVM as part of the Linux kernel. With both together, you have the virtualization capabilities of KVM since KVM transforms the Linux host into a type-1 hypervisor. With the KVM platform, you can run multiple virtual machines on top of a single physical host.
The oVirt platform then acts as the centralized management plane on top of KVM. If you have dozens or even hundreds of KVM hosts and many virtual machines, with various virtual networks and storage devices, oVirt helps you to manage these at scale.
Note the following benefits of using oVirt with KVM as a management solution:
- Centralized management – Administrators managing virtualization solutions in the modern data center expect to use seamless and easy-to-manage solutions. The oVirt platform provides a single interface for managing multiple KVM hosts
- Advanced capabilities – With the oVirt platform, you get advanced virtualization features. These include features that most have come to expect as required, such as live migration, high availability, load balancing, and snapshots. It makes it easier to manage large-scale environments
- Web-based user interface – While one of the great things about KVM is the ability to perform most operations from the command line, oVirt gives you the ability to have a web-based GUI. This makes it much easier to manage KVM hosts at scale and not have to do everything from the command line
What are the components of oVirt?
The components of oVirt includes the oVirt engine and the oVirt agents. How are each of these used?
oVirt Engine – This is the component that oVirt uses to provide the frontend web administration GUI for oVirt. It is a Java-based engine that makes the administration tasks for KVM possible. These include managing VMs, storage, virtual networks, creating images, and other tasks.
Agents – These are used to communicate between oVirt and the KVM hosts that it manages. The oVirt engine communicates with the hosts using the agents. It is also known as vdsm.
According to the official project page, it is noted that oVirt is built upon several other open source community projects, including libvirt, Gluster, PatternFly, and Ansible.
Where can you download oVirt?
The oVirt packages are free and open source software that you can download from the official oVirt website, located here: oVirt free open-source virtualization solution.
The latest version of the oVirt solution is version 4.5.5 that was released at the end of 2023.
How do you get started testing with oVirt?
You can download the “oVirt node” installation in the form of an ISO image. It is a good idea to get familiar with oVirt in a lab environment first before attempting to work with it in production.
Minimum requirements
There are a few minimum requirements that you need to pay attention to before working with the oVirt installation on a node. Note the following:
- You will need either a single physical host or a virtual machine to get started
- 16 GB of RAM is needed
- 4 CPU cores
- You will need sufficient disk space for the OS, oVirt Engine, and virtual machines
- You can run a supported Linux distribution, including CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu
- Proper network connectivity for access to the web-based oVirt Engine console and VM network interfaces
- You can use a GlusterFS replica of 1 for shared storage to get started with a single node for testing
Below is a screenshot after installing the oVirt node from ISO:
Self-hosted engine
One of the configurations you can run for testing is what oVirt calls the self-hosted engine. When you run the self-hosted engine, it is installed as a VM on the oVirt host. It helps to simplify the configuration of oVirt infrastructure and the need for a separate physical server or virtual machine for testing the management engine.
This is an ideal setup for learning oVirt in a lab environment and provides a sandbox environment you can use to test and evaluate the complete oVirt solution using only a single machine.
GlusterFS Replica 1 storage
If you don’t have dedicated storage hardware to test out oVirt, you can use the oVirt hyperconverged infrastructure configuration with GlusterFS. It will create a GlusterFS Replica 1 shared file system that provides many benefits, including the following:
- It is free – You don’t have to have dedicated storage hardware. Instead you can use a virtual disk in a VM or a physical host and run everything on the single host.
- It is simple – GlusterFS is straightforward to configure and allows you to quickly set up shared storage without the need to manage traditional SANs, NAS devices, etc.
- Good performance – It only has a single replica of data (not recommended for production but fine for a test lab). This provides decent performance and allows fully testing out the features and capabilities of oVirt.
Wrapping up
The oVirt solution nicely complements Kernel Virtual Machine in providing a solution that has a modern interface and is able to manage and configure many different KVM hosts. It allows admins to have the tools they need to work with KVM effectively in a point and click fashion and it also allows using advanced virtualization features and capabilities. Using the oVirt node ISO installation, you can have quick and easy access to a read-made virtualization host that has the minimal components installed along with cockpit for working management and administration.
Related Posts:
KVM for Beginners – QEMU, KVM, and Libvirt Installation and Configuration – Part 2
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