Openvirt

• Intro
• Components
• Control Panel
• Storage
• Release
• Further Info
• Videos

Intro
	Openvirt
	Web Based Control Panel
	Custom Linux Kernel
	Kernel Samepage Merging
	High Availability Service
	Pre-built Templates

Openvirt

Openvirt provides a full virtualization platform for Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD virtual machines.

Features include:

• Open source commercial quality virtualization
• Completely free of license fees
• Web based control panel for easy management
• Full virtualization of unmodified operating systems
• Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD guest support
• Live migration - even between hosts with completely different CPUs
• High availability
• Integration with iSCSI, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand SANs
• Monitoring service for the physical host
• Monitoring service for the virtual machines
• Oracle's OCFS2 and Red Hat's GFS filesystems for shared storage
• Support for most networks including 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand
• Libvirt API supports a variety of 3rd party management tools - graphical, CLI and web based

Debian 5.0 virtual machine running on KVM.	Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise 32-bit virtual machine running on KVM. 8 processors and 16GB of RAM.	Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise virtual machine running on KVM. 8 processors and 16GB of RAM.
Virtual machines: Debian 5.0, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 R2.

Web Based Control Panel

A secure HTTPS web based control panel is used to manage the Openvirt infrastructure.

More details on the Control Panel.

Custom Linux Kernel

We provide a custom Openvirt kernel that we build from kernel.org sources. These kernels are purely optional. Install them to benefit from the latest KVM hypervisor or stick with the standard Ubuntu kernel.

Kernel Samepage Merging

A new Linux kernel feature which combines identical memory pages from multiple processes into one copy on write memory region. Because KVM guest virtual machines run as processes under Linux, this feature can significantly reduce the amount of physical memory used by a host.

KSM works automatically and requires no configuration.

KSM not enabled.	KSM enabled.
KSM in action. On the left, KSM is not enabled. On the right, it is. Memory usage has dropped by over 50% with KSM enabled.

High Availability Service

When enabled, the HA service will automatically start virtual machines that were running on a host that failed. The HA service works whether you have 2 or 200 hosts in your cluster. Ask for the available PDF document if you want to implement HA in your cluster.

Pre-built Templates

We provide pre-built templates for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu. From these, you can create cloned virtual machines in mere seconds.

We also provide detailed tutorials on how to create your own custom templates.