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 Appliance is provided. Manually installing the Manager virtual machine is not supported.
Self-hosted engine deployment is performed through a simplified wizard in the Cockpit user interface, or through the command line using hosted-engine --deploy. Cockpit is the preferred installation method.
| System Type | Supported Versions |
|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux host | 7.5 |
| Red Hat Virtualization Host | 7.5 |
| HostedEngine-VM (Manager) | 7.5 |
For hardware requirements, see Host Requirements in the Planning and Prerequisites Guide.
To avoid potential timing or authentication issues, configure the Network Time Protocol (NTP) on the hosts, Manager, and other servers in the environment to synchronize with the same NTP server. See Configuring NTP Using the chrony Suite and Synchronizing the System Clock with a Remote Server in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide.
