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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Open Virtualisation (oVirt) Community Launch underway

For those with a deep interest in open virtualisation solutions you will have probably noticed that the oVirt project is having (or has had depending on when you read this) its community launch.

I've been waiting for this for quite some time and it's finally here.  It's a pity I couldn't attend as I'm really keen to contribute.

So what is the project and community about?

Paraphrasing from material released during the workshop, the project will deliver a complete & cohesive virtualisation platform including hypervisor, engine, API and GUI. It will allow all users to easily deploy and manage KVM based virtual machines.

The project gets its bootstrap  from the opensourcing by Red Hat of its virtualisation management assets with the intention of creating a vibrant upstream community

It builds on existing open source code such as



  • KVM  - hypervisor
  • oVirt Node - small image designed to run virtual machines
  • virt tools - Management API for KVM (& other hypervisors)


and introduces new community projects


  • oVirt: Engine - back end virtualisation management server
  • oVirt: VDSM - Node Management API used by oVirt engine or other applications to manage the hypervisor.
  • oVirt: Web Admin - HTML / AJAX based GUI for managing oVirt Platform
  • oVirt: User Portal- HTML based user portal for non-admin use cases
  • oVirt: API - open API for management and integration with other tools
  • oVirt: Reports - Reporting & Dashboards based on Jasper Reports

If you're not excited by that, I'm sorry, I am excited :-)