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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="libvir.css" /><title>Introduction</title></head><body><div id="container"><div id="intro"><div id="adjustments"></div><div id="pageHeader"></div><div id="content2"><h1 class="style1">Introduction</h1><p>Libvir is a C toolkit to interract with the virtualization capabilities of
recent versions of Linux (and other OSes), but ibvir won't try to provide all
possible interfaces for interacting with the virtualization features of a set
of Linux (or other OS) system.</p><p>To avoid ambiguity about the terms used here here are the definitions for
soem of the specific terms used in libvir documentation:</p><ul><li>a <strong>node</strong> is a single physical machine</li>
<li>an <strong>hypervisor</strong> is a layer of software allowing to
virtualize a node in a set of virtual machines with possibly different
configurations than the node itself</li>
<li>a <strong>domain</strong> is an instance of an operating system running
on a virtualized machine</li>
</ul><p>Now we can define the goal of libvir: to provide the lowest possible
generic and stable layer to manage domains on a node.</p><p>This implies the following:</p><ul><li>the API should not be targetted to a single virtualization environment
though Xen is the current default, which also means that some very
specific capabilities which are not generic enough may not be provided as
libvir APIs</li>
<li>the API should allow to do efficiently and cleanly all the operations
needed to manage domains on a node</li>
<li>the API will not try to provide hight level multi-nodes management
features like load balancing, though they could be implemented on top of
libvir</li>
<li>stability of the API is a big concern, libvir should isolate
applications from the frequent changes expected at the lower level of the
virtualization framework</li>
</ul><p>So libvir should be a building block for higher level management tools or
for applications focusing on virtualization on a single node (the only
exception being domain migration between node capabilities which may need to
be added at the libvir level)</p><p> </p><p></p></div></div><div class="linkList2"><div class="llinks2"><h3 class="links2"><span>main menu</span></h3><ul><li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li><li><a href="news.html">Releases</a></li><li><a href="intro.html">Introduction</a></li><li><a href="architecture.html">libvir architecture</a></li><li><a href="downloads.html">Downloads</a></li><li><a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li><li><a href="bugs.html">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li><li><a style="font-weight:bold" href="html/index.html">API Menu</a></li><li><a href="ChangeLog.html">Recent Changes</a></li></ul></div><div class="llinks2"><h3 class="links2"><span>related links</span></h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/">Mail archive</a></li><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html">Xen project</a></li><li><form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input name="query" type="text" size="12" value="Search..." /><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Go" /></form></li><li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/"><img src="Libxml2-Logo-90x34.gif" alt="Made with Libxml2 Logo" /></a></li></ul></div></div><div id="bottom"><p class="p1"></p></div></div></body></html>