What is OVirt?
oVirt is an open-source virtualization management platform that provides a graphical user interface and REST API for managing virtual machines, storage, and networking in an enterprise data center. It is designed to enable administrators to easily create and manage virtualized infrastructure components like hosts, VMs, storage, and networks.
Some key capabilities and features of oVirt include:
- Centralized VM, host, storage, network, and template management using a web-based GUI
- REST API for automation and integration
- Live migration of VMs between hosts
- High availability and disaster recovery features
- Storage management including NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and GlusterFS
- Fine-grained role-based access control
- Reporting and monitoring
- Scalability to manage many hosts and VMs in large environments
Under the hood, oVirt leverages the KVM hypervisor for virtualization. It can manage KVM, Xen, and ESXi hosts as well as leverage additional capabilities through VDSM (Virtual Desktop and Server Manager). oVirt provides capabilities beyond core virtualization like user-facing self-service portals.
oVirt is commonly used by organizations looking for an open source alternative to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. It is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
VMware vSphere Hypervisor, Proxmox Virtual Environment, virt-manager, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Virtualizor, clearVM, Archipel, Danube Cloud, XCP-ng, Citrix Hypervisor, Cloudmin, VMmanager, OpenNode Cloud Platform, Virtkick, Kimchi, Karesansui are some alternatives to OVirt.