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 8 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.

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

See: Administration Guide

Hosts, also known as hypervisors, are the physical servers on which virtual machines run. Full virtualization is provided by using a loadable Linux kernel module called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM can concurrently host multiple virtual machines running either Windows or Linux operating systems. Virtual machines run on the host machine and are managed remotely by the Red Hat Virtualization Manager.

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.

You should 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; however, only the data domain is now fully supported:

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 data warehouse that collects monitoring data about hosts, virtual machines, and storage. Data Warehouse, which includes a database and a service, must be installed and configured along with the Manager setup, either on the same machine or on a separate server.

The Red Hat Virtualization installation creates two databases:

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.