Managing virtual infrastructures with oVirt 3.1

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Article from ADMIN 11/2012

By Thomas Drilling

Version 3.1 of the oVirt management platform for virtual infrastructures has recently become available. On Fedora 17, the new release is easy to install and deploy.

Some years ago, Red Hat caused displeasure in the Linux community because the graphical administration tool for its own virtualization solution, RHEV, presupposed a Windows machine. This Microsoft legacy was a result of the 2008 Red Hat acquisition of the KVM hypervisor developed by Israeli KVM specialists Qumranet, along with what was at the time a nearly finished desktop virtualization product based on Windows.

Bye-Bye Windows

Although the Red Hat developers ported all the components of the management component, RHEV-M, from C# to Java in RHEV 3.0 [1], use of the Administrator Console for RHEV still officially required a Windows machine with Internet Explorer 7 or greater because the oVirt-based front end had still not mastered all of its predecessor's features.

Since Red Hat handed over oVirt to the community under the Apache Open Source license, development of the software has been continued under the umbrella of the oVirt project by SUSE, Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, and others. Now, oVirt has the potential to do battle with commercial solutions by VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft as a powerful, free, alternative cloud management platform that is by no means capable of managing only Red Hat-based structures.

The oVirt project is based on many technologies developed by Red Hat with the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) and the libvirt virtualization API. The first final and stable oVirt version (3.0) is contained as a technology preview in Red Hat's commercial virtualization solution RHEV 3.0 [1] that became available in January of this year.