Data Center

In the navigation area on the left, starting with the Default data center, you can see the administrable resources of the virtualized infrastructure, consisting of data centers, clusters, storage, and disks, as well as hosts, pools, templates, and VMs (Figure 2). A complex role and authorization schema allows the administrator to delegate administrative tasks. The entry point for this is the "Configure" link at the top left (Figure 3).

Figure 2: The structure of a virtual environment in oVirt.

Figure 3: oVirt has a sophisticated roles and authorizations model.

A virtual host can be created with a click on New in the Hosts tab, even if creating hosts only makes sense when the appropriate conditions, such as storage for the virtual disk, ISOs, and so on, are met.

Configuring the Firewall

In addition to the IP address (or FQDN name) of the hosts, the dialog expects a symbolic name and a password. The host must also be accessible via SSH.

If the hypervisor used is a freshly installed Fedora 17 system, as in the example, you will not be able to add this host in oVirt because of the SSH connection setup. If you don't know the appropriate iptables rule off the top of your head, you first need to disable iptables as root on the hypervisor like this:

systemctl stop iptables.service

Many dialogs in oVirt start with a click on Guide Me , a wizard that lets you, for example, connect to an existing ISO library or storage (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The oVirt developers also provide a wizard.

To create a virtual machine, you need to check the target host in the desired cluster in the navigation frame on the left-hand side; in the right-hand panel, enable the Virtual Machines tab and click on New Server or New Desktop .

Conclusions

Thanks to oVirt, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution makes up ground on the well-established solutions by VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft's System Center 2012. Because of the open license, it also supports self-built but professional solutions for the management of virtual environments. Unfortunately, oVirt is not even officially used in RHEV 3, at least not in terms of the admin front end. However, with Fedora 17, you can already see how Red Hat envisions a future without .NET and Active Directory. The next RHEV version will finally do without a Windows administration computer.