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Preface

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform is a virtualization management solution providing fully integrated management for virtual machines. Based on the leading open source virtualization platform, it provides superior technical capabilities and scalability for virtual environments.

1. About this Guide

This guide enables you to install and configure Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and create your first virtual machine.

1.1. Audience

This document is designed as a guide for system administrators to set up Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for the first time. It covers the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization across multiple hosts using three different storage types. After completing this guide, you will have a basic working Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment which can be scaled and further configured for deployment across large enterprises.
It is recommended that the users of this document have advanced Linux or Windows systems administration experience, including familiarity with virtual machine data center operations.

1.2. Overview

The Quick Start Guide takes you through the following tasks:
  • Installing the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager and Hypervisor
  • Configuring hosts, clusters, storage and networking
  • Creating and accessing virtual machines
Workflow of setting up Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
Figure 1. Workflow of setting up Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

1.3. Documentation Suite

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization documentation suite provides information on installation, development of applications, configuration and usage of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform and its related products.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Administration Guide describes how to setup, configure and manage Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. It assumes that you have successfully installed the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization manager and hosts.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Evaluation Guide enables prospective customers to evaluate the features of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Use this guide if you have an evaluation license.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Installation Guide describes the installation prerequisites and procedures. Read this if you need to install Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The installation of hosts, manager and storage are covered in this guide. You will need to refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Administration Guide to configure the system before you can start using the platform.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Manager Release Notes contain release specific information for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Managers.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Power User Portal Guide describes how power users can create and manage virtual machines from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization user portal.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Quick Start Guide (the book you are reading) provides quick and simple instructions for first time users to set up a basic Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — REST API Guide describes how to use the REST API to set up and manage virtualization tasks. Use this guide if you wish to develop systems which integrate with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, using an open and platform independent API.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Technical Reference Guide describes the technical architecture of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and its interactions with existing infrastructure.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — User Portal Guide describes how users of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization system can access and use virtual desktops.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Hypervisor Deployment Guide describes how to deploy and install the hypervisor. Read this guide if you need advanced information about installing and deploying Hypervisors. The basic installation of Hypervisor hosts is also described in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Installation Guide.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux — V2V Guide describes importing virtual machines from KVM, Xen and VMware ESX to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and KVM managed by libvirt.