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33 lines
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33 lines
4.7 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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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="libvirt.css" /><link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/32favicon.png" /><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>Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities
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ofrecent versions of Linux (and other OSes), but libvirt won't try to
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provideall possible interfaces for interacting with the virtualization
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features.</p><p>To avoid ambiguity about the terms used here here are the definitions
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forsome of the specific concepts used in libvirt documentation:</p><ul><li>a <strong>node</strong>is a single physical machine</li>
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<li>an <strong>hypervisor</strong>is a layer of software allowing
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tovirtualize a node in a set of virtual machines with possibly
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differentconfigurations than the node itself</li>
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<li>a <strong>domain</strong>is an instance of an operating system
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runningon a virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor</li>
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</ul><p style="text-align: center"><img alt="Hypervisor and domains running on a node" src="node.gif" /></p><p>Now we can define the goal of libvirt: to provide the lowest
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possiblegeneric and stable layer to manage domains on a node.</p><p>This implies the following:</p><ul><li>the API is not targetted to a single virtualization environment,
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itcurrently supports Xen and QEmu/KVM. This also implies that some
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veryspecific capabilities which are not generic enough may not be
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provided aslibvirt APIs</li>
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<li>the API should allow to do efficiently and cleanly all the
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operationsneeded to manage domains on a node</li>
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<li>the API will not try to provide hight level multi-nodes
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managementfeatures like load balancing, though they could be implemented
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on top oflibvirt</li>
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<li>stability of the API is a big concern, libvirt should
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isolateapplications from the frequent changes expected at the lower level
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of thevirtualization framework</li>
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</ul><p>So libvirt should be a building block for higher level management toolsand
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for applications focusing on virtualization of a single node (the
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onlyexception being domain migration between node capabilities which may need
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tobe added at the libvirt level). Where possible libvirt should be
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extendableto be able to provide the same API for remote nodes, however this
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is not thecase at the moment, the code currently handle only local node
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accesses(extension for remote access support is being worked on, see<a href="bugs.html">the mailing list</a>discussions about it).</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">libvirt architecture</a></li><li><a href="downloads.html">Downloads</a></li><li><a href="format.html">XML Formats</a></li><li><a href="python.html">Binding for Python</a></li><li><a href="errors.html">Handling of errors</a></li><li><a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li><li><a href="bugs.html">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html">API Menu</a></li><li><a href="examples/index.html">C code examples</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="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?product=Fedora+Core&component=libvirt&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=MODIFIED&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr">Open bugs</a></li><li><a href="http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/">virt-manager</a></li><li><a href="http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/Sys-Virt-0.1.0/">Perl bindings</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><p class="credits">Graphics and design by <a href="mail:dfong@redhat.com">Diana Fong</a></p></div></div><div id="bottom"><p class="p1"></p></div></div></body></html>
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