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Chapter 1. Overview

1.1. System Components
1.1.1. About the Virtual Machines
1.1.2. About SPICE
1.2. Installation Workflow
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provides IT departments with the tools to meet the challenges of managing complex environments. Red Hat's state-of-the-art virtualization platform enables administrators to reduce the cost and complexity of large deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform provides:

1.1. System Components

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform consists of one or more hosts (either Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and higher systems) and at least one manager. The virtual machines are hosted on the hosts. The system and all its components are managed through a centralized management system.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager acts as 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 itself also runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The manager provides a graphical user interface to administer the physical and logical resources within the virtual environment infrastructure. It can be used to manage provisioning, connection protocols, user sessions, virtual machine pools, images and high availability/clustering. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager exposes an Administration Portal, a User Portal, and an Application Programming Interface (API).
  • The Administration Portal is used to perform setup, configuration, and management of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.
  • The User Portal is used to start, stop, reboot, and connect to virtual machines. Users granted power user access by the environment's administrators are also able to create virtual machine templates and, virtual machines from this interface.
  • The REST API provides and interface for automation of tasks normally accomplished manually by users. Scripts that make use of the REST API are able to be written in any language which supports accessing HTTP and HTTPS resources.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor(s)
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor is a fully featured virtualization platform for quick, easy deployment and management of virtualized guests. The Hypervisor is designed for management via the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. It provides a thin virtualization layer deployed across the server infrastructure.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which is a core component of the Linux kernel, is used to provide virtualization. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor 6 and later are supported by this release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Host(s)
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager also supports the use of systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 AMD64/Intel 64 versions as virtualization hosts.

1.1.1. About the Virtual Machines

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform enables you to create virtual machines that perform the same functions as physical machines. Using a standard Web browser, users can run virtual machines that behave like physical desktops. Multiple levels of permissions allow users with different roles to manage virtual machines to meet the requirements of the enterprise.
Supported Guests
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization presently supports the following virtualized guest operating systems:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Windows XP Service Pack 3 and newer (32 bit only)
  • Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and newer (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Windows Server 2008 (32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit only)

1.1.2. About SPICE

The SPICE protocol allows the virtual machine to connect to the host with physical PC-like graphics performance. It supplies video at more than 30 frames per second, bi-directional audio (for soft-phones/IP phones), bi-directional video (for video telephony/video conferencing) and USB redirection from the client’s USB port into the virtual machine. SPICE also supports connection to multiple monitors with a single virtual machine. SPICE is automatically installed via ActiveX, using the browser on the virtual machine.