mirror of
https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt.git
synced 2024-12-23 14:15:28 +00:00
166 lines
8.5 KiB
HTML
166 lines
8.5 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
|
|
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
|
|
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
|
|
<!--
|
|
This file is autogenerated from goals.html.in
|
|
Do not edit this file. Changes will be lost.
|
|
-->
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="main.css" />
|
|
<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="32favicon.png" />
|
|
<title>libvirt: Terminology and goals</title>
|
|
<meta name="description" content="libvirt, virtualization, virtualization API" />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<div id="header">
|
|
<div id="headerLogo"></div>
|
|
<div id="headerSearch">
|
|
<form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><div>
|
|
<input id="query" name="query" type="text" size="12" value="" />
|
|
<input id="submit" name="submit" type="submit" value="Search" />
|
|
</div></form>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</div>
|
|
<div id="body">
|
|
<div id="menu">
|
|
<ul class="l0"><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Front page of the libvirt website" class="inactive" href="index.html">Home</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Details of new features and bugs fixed in each release" class="inactive" href="news.html">News</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Get the latest source releases, binary builds and get access to the source repository" class="inactive" href="downloads.html">Downloads</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Information for users, administrators and developers" class="active" href="docs.html">Documentation</a>
|
|
<ul class="l1"><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Information about deploying and using libvirt" class="inactive" href="deployment.html">Deployment</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Overview of the logical subsystems in the libvirt API" class="active" href="intro.html">Architecture</a>
|
|
<ul class="l2"><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<span class="active">Goals</span>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="The libvirt API concepts" class="inactive" href="api.html">API concepts</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Managing virtual machines" class="inactive" href="archdomain.html">Domains</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Providing isolated networks and NAT based network connectivity" class="inactive" href="archnetwork.html">Network</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Managing storage pools and volumes" class="inactive" href="archstorage.html">Storage</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Enumerating host node devices" class="inactive" href="archnode.html">Node Devices</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li></ul>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Description of the XML formats used in libvirt" class="inactive" href="format.html">XML format</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Hypervisor specific driver information" class="inactive" href="drivers.html">Drivers</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Reference manual for the C public API" class="inactive" href="html/index.html">API reference</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Bindings of the libvirt API for other languages" class="inactive" href="bindings.html">Language bindings</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Working on the internals of libvirt API, driver and daemon code" class="inactive" href="internals.html">Internals</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li></ul>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="User contributed content" class="inactive" href="http://wiki.libvirt.org">Wiki</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Frequently asked questions" class="inactive" href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="How and where to report bugs and request features" class="inactive" href="bugs.html">Bug reports</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="How to contact the developers via email and IRC" class="inactive" href="contact.html">Contact</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Miscellaneous links of interest related to libvirt" class="inactive" href="relatedlinks.html">Related Links</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li><li>
|
|
<div>
|
|
<a title="Overview of all content on the website" class="inactive" href="sitemap.html">Sitemap</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</li></ul>
|
|
</div>
|
|
<div id="content">
|
|
<h1>Terminology and goals</h1>
|
|
<p>To avoid ambiguity about the terms used, here are the definitions
|
|
for some of the specific concepts used in libvirt 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
|
|
(or subsystem in the case of container virtualization) running on a
|
|
virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor</li></ul>
|
|
<p class="image">
|
|
<img alt="Hypervisor and domains running on a node" src="node.gif" /></p>
|
|
<p>Now we can define the goal of libvirt: to provide a common generic
|
|
and stable layer to securely manage domains on a node. The node may be
|
|
distant and libvirt should provide all APIs needed to provision, create,
|
|
modify, monitor, control, migrate and stop the domains, within the limits
|
|
of the support of the hypervisor for those operations. Multiple mode may
|
|
be accessed with libvirt simultaneously but the APIs are limited to
|
|
single node operations.</p>
|
|
<p>This implies the following sub-goals:</p>
|
|
<ul><li>the API should not be targeted to a single virtualization environment
|
|
which also means that some very specific capabilities which are not generic
|
|
enough may not be provided as libvirt 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 high level virtualization policies or
|
|
multi-nodes management features like load balancing, but the API should be
|
|
sufficient so they can be implemented on top of libvirt</li><li>stability of the API is a big concern, libvirt should isolate
|
|
applications from the frequent changes expected at the lower level of the
|
|
virtualization framework</li><li>the node being managed may be on a different physical machine than
|
|
the management program using libvirt, to this effect libvirt supports
|
|
remote access, but should only do so by using secure protocols.</li><li>libvirt will provide APIs to enumerate, monitor and use the resources
|
|
available on the managed node, including CPUs, memory, storage, networking,
|
|
and NUMA partitions.</li></ul>
|
|
<p>So libvirt is intended to be a building block for higher level
|
|
management tools and for applications focusing on virtualization of a
|
|
single node (the only exception being domain migration between node
|
|
capabilities which involves more than one node).</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</div>
|
|
<div id="footer">
|
|
<p id="sponsor">
|
|
Sponsored by:<br /><a href="http://et.redhat.com/"><img src="et.png" alt="Project sponsored by Red Hat Emerging Technology" /></a></p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|