Enterprise virtualization with oVirt

oVirt is one of the open-source virtualization management platforms available and it was founded by Red Hat as a community project. As discussed, virtualization is generally one of the fundamental parts of most cloud environments, and we will look into some of the features of one of the virtualization applications.

There are four main components of a typical setup of virtualization software used for large-scale applications:

• Virtualization engine: The virtualization engine is responsible for deployment, monitoring followed by start and stop, the creation of virtual machines along with configuration related to storage, network, and many more.
• Hosts and guests: Hosts are basically physical hardware on which the actual VM (guests) reside. There is a minimal OS specially designed for virtualization called a hypervisor, installed on top of hosts. This hypervisor is controlled by the virtualization engine.
• Storage: Storage is used for storing VM disk images, snapshots, ISO files, and many more. The storage can be NFS, iSCSI, GlusterFS, and many more POSIX-compatible network filesystems.
• Network: Network components on the physical layer are Network Interface Cards (NIC); however, there are virtual NICs created to allow communication between virtual machines. These virtual NICs are also assigned IP address for seamless communication. Since they are virtual, we can detach and attach virtual NIC from one VM to another:

It's a large shared pool of resources. As a benefit that virtualization provides, cloud providers generally have a large pool of resources, which are then shared by their customers.

Let's look at how the admin panel might look. The following screenshot is of the admin panel of the oVirt. As we can see, it displays details related to:

• The number of Data Centers available
• The number of Hosts available
• The number of Storage Domains
• Total number of Virtual Machines

It also displays graphical information related to CPU, Memory, and Storage consumed by the virtual machines while running:

It is the CSP's responsibility to ensure that this pool of resources is available so that new users will be able to provision new VMs whenever they are required.

All providers have a certain limit on the number of resources that can be made available to the users. In AWS, sometimes when you try to launch a new on-demand or stop and start existing on-demand instances, you might get an error that resources are currently not available. In order to make sure that you don't get hit by the limit, make sure to purchase a certain amount of reserved instance capacity.

There are several other important benefits that virtualization provides; let's explore them.