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Chapter 1. Introducing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provides a full-featured virtualization platform and the tools required to efficiently manage it. This chapter introduces the various virtualization technologies, applications and features and explains how they work. The purpose of this chapter is to assist Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization users in understanding virtualization.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor is a compact, full-featured virtualization platform for quickly and easily deploying and managing virtualized guests. The Hypervisor is a minimal installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux designed specifically to support virtualization workloads. You can manage hypervisors with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
Full virtualization is provided by using a loadable Linux kernel module called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM can concurrently host multiple virtualized guests running either Windows or Linux operating systems. Virtualized guests run as individual Linux processes on the host machine and are managed remotely using the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is a centralized management system that allows system administrators to view and manage virtual machines and images. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager provides a comprehensive range of features including search capabilities, resource management, live migrations, and provisioning. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The manager provides you with a graphical user interface which you can use to manager the physical and logical resources of the virtual environment. The graphical user interface (GUI) can be used to manage provisioning, connection protocols, user sessions, virtual machine pools, images, and virtual machine high availability. You can interact with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager by using an Administration Portal, a User Portal, and an Application Programming Interface (API).
  • The Administration Portal is used to set up, configure and manage the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.
  • The User Portal is used to start, stop, reboot, and connect to virtual machines. Users can be granted "power user" access by the environment's administrators. Power users are allowed to create virtual machine templates and virtual machines from this interface.
  • The REST API provides an interface for automation of tasks normally accomplished manually by users. Scripts that make use of the REST API can be written in any language which supports accessing HTTP and HTTPS resources.