Chapter 1. Introduction

A self-hosted engine is a virtualized environment in which the Red Hat Virtualization Manager, or engine, runs on a virtual machine on the hosts managed by that Manager. The virtual machine is created as part of the host configuration, and the Manager is installed and configured in parallel to the host configuration process. The primary benefit of the self-hosted engine is that it requires less hardware to deploy an instance of Red Hat Virtualization as the Manager runs as a virtual machine, not on physical hardware. Additionally, the Manager is configured to be highly available. If the host running the Manager virtual machine goes into maintenance mode, or fails unexpectedly, the virtual machine migrates automatically to another host in the environment. Hosts that can run the Manager virtual machine are referred to as self-hosted engine nodes. At least two self-hosted engine nodes are required to support the high availability feature.

For the Manager virtual machine installation, a RHV-M Virtual Appliance is provided. Manually installing the Manager virtual machine is not supported. To customize the Manager virtual machine, you can use a custom cloud-init script with the appliance. Creating custom cloud-init scripts is currently outside the scope of this documentation. A default cloud-init script can be generated during the deployment.

For hardware requirements, see Host Requirements in the Planning and Prerequisites Guide.

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts, the Cockpit user interface or hosted-engine --deploy can be used to deploy the self-hosted engine. On Red Hat Virtualization Host (RHVH), self-hosted engine deployment is performed through the Cockpit user interface. The Cockpit user interface is a UI version of the hosted-engine script that assists with configuring the host and Manager virtual machine.