Component Principles

oVirt Engine

The oVirt engine runs on JBoss-based Java applications. The service communicates with Vdsm on the host to deploy, start, stop, migrate, and monitor VMs. In addition, the service can create new images on the storage by using templates. The oVirt engine uses a scalable, secure, and high-performance architecture to provide centralized management for large-scale servers and desktop virtualization.

oVirt provides the following functions:

• VM life cycle management.
• Network management: adding logical networks to the host.
• Storage management: managing storage domains (NFS, iSCSI and local storage) and VM disks.
• High availability: automatically restarting VMs of a faulty node on another node.
• Live migration: migrating running VMs between nodes without interrupting services.
• System scheduling: performing load balancing for VMs based on resource usage or policies.
• Energy saving: deploying VMs on a few servers during off-peak hours.
• Maintenance manager: ensuring that VMs are not stopped during the planned maintenance period.
• Image management: providing template-based configuration, thin provisioning, and snapshot .
• Monitoring: monitoring all objects in the system, such as VMs, nodes, networks, and storage.
• Importing and exporting: importing and exporting a VM or template by using an OVF file.

Figure 1 shows the oVirt engine component architecture.

oVirt Node

An oVirt node is a compute node where VMs run. For details about how to install a common Kunpeng server as a compute node in the oVirt virtual environment, see Kunpeng oVirt Lightweight Virtualization Management Platform Deployment Guide.

Vdsm on an oVirt node functions as the agent of the oVirt engine. It manages all resources in the oVirt virtual environment and performs client operations. A Vdsm command is run on each compute node. After receiving the instruction from the client, Vdsm invokes the libvirt underlying tool library to manage VMs and hardware devices. QEMU supports the display of SPICE drivers. Therefore, clients can use SPICE client software to access VMs in graphical mode.

The Storage Pool Manager (SPM) is a role given to one of the hosts in the data center enabling it to manage the storage domains of the data center. Any host in the data center can function as an SPM. The system grants the role to one of the hosts in the data center. The SPM does not affect the normal functions of the host. The host running as the SPM can still provide virtual resources for running VMs.

Figure 2 shows the oVirt node architecture.