Chapter 2. Red Hat Virtualization Components

The Red Hat Virtualization Manager provides a graphical user interface and a RESTful API to manage the resources of the Red Hat Virtualization environment. In a standalone Manager environment, the Manager is installed on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 physical machine, or a virtual machine hosted in a separate environment. In a self-hosted engine environment, the Manager is installed as a virtual machine hosted on self-hosted engine nodes in the same environment it manages.

High availability for the Manager is only supported in a self-hosted engine environment. At least two self-hosted engine nodes are required for high availability.

See: Administration Guide

Red Hat Virtualization supports two types of host: Red Hat Virtualization Host and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can use either or both in your Red Hat Virtualization environment, depending on your requirements.

Red Hat recommends that you install at least two hosts and attach them to the Red Hat Virtualization environment. If you attach only one host, you cannot access features such as migration and high availability.

See: Hosts in the Administration Guide.

Setting up storage and attaching it to your Red Hat Virtualization environment is a prerequisite before you can start creating end-user virtual machines. Red Hat Virtualization has three types of storage domains:

The ISO and export domains only support file-based storage types (NFS, POSIX, or GlusterFS). The ISO domain supports local storage when used in a local storage data center.

See: Storage in the Administration Guide.

The Red Hat Virtualization Manager includes a comprehensive management history database, which can be utilized by any application to extract a range of information at the data center, cluster, and host levels. Installing Data Warehouse creates the ovirt_engine_history database, in which the Manager is configured to log information for reporting purposes. The Data Warehouse component must be installed and configured along with the Manager setup.

To calculate an estimate of the space and resources the ovirt_engine_history database will use, use the RHV Manager History Database Size Calculator tool. The estimate is based on the number of entities and the length of time you have chosen to retain the history records.

See: Data Warehouse Guide

Operations such as storage, host management, user connections, and virtual machine connectivity all rely on a well-planned and well-configured network to deliver optimal performance. Setting up networking is a vital prerequisite for a Red Hat Virtualization environment. Planning for your projected networking requirements and implementing your network accordingly is much simpler than discovering your networking requirements through use and altering your network configuration retroactively.

Red Hat Virtualization separates network traffic by defining logical networks. Logical networks define the path that a selected network traffic type must take through the network. They are created to isolate network traffic by functionality or to virtualize a physical topology.

The ovirtmgmt logical network is created by default and labeled as the Management network. The ovirtmgmt logical network is intended for management traffic between the Red Hat Virtualization Manager and hosts. You can define additional logical networks to segregate:

See: Logical Networks in the Administration Guide.