oVirt 3.3 release brings OpenStack and Gluster integration

Developed by a global community, oVirt offers advanced virtualization capabilities, including high availability, live migration, live storage migration, the ability to schedule and control the deployment of virtual machines, and more. oVirt aims to deliver both a cohesive stack and discretely reusable components for open virtualization management, and to improve key building blocks for private and public cloud deployments. oVirt also serves as the upstream development community for Red Hat’s supported commercial virtualization offering, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

“With this release, the oVirt community begins integrating oVirt with other important open source projects such as OpenStack and Gluster,” said Itamar Heim, oVirt board member and Director, Software Engineering for Red Hat. “oVirt, OpenStack, and Gluster are community projects where Red Hat is deeply committed, and with oVirt 3.3 developers can truly see the benefits of leveraging multiple open source community projects to address the requirements of complex use cases such as datacenter virtualization.”

OpenStack Integration
oVirt now leverages technology from the OpenStack project so that administrators can define network configurations, image libraries, and virtual machine deployment policies once and use them in either oVirt or OpenStack. Use of OpenStack projects in oVirt for requirements shared by both projects also allows the oVirt community to concentrate its resources on requirements specific to datacenter virtualization while still offering users the capabilities they need, in the best open source tradition of collaboration and sharing.

oVirt 3.3 adds:
· OpenStack Networking (Neutron) Integration, which provides advanced networking capabilities and a shared repository of networking policies and configurations.
· OpenStack Glance Integration, which allows oVirt users to consume, export and share virtual machine image libraries with OpenStack. For more information, watch this deep dive presentation on oVirt / Glance integration.
· Cloud-Init Integration, which allows oVirt to perform the initial virtual machine setup by integrating networking, SSH keys, timezone, user data and more for guest instances that are configured through Cloud-Init or OpenStack Heat.

Gluster Integration
Gluster’s storage infrastructure offers the leading scale-out, open source solution for managing unstructured data. Gluster’s oVirt and OpenStack readiness and support for the image, file and block storage allows oVirt users and developers to exploit Gluster scale-out storage capacity and share that capacity with OpenStack environments.

oVirt 3.3 offers two new Gluster features for enhanced management capabilities, including:
· Gluster FS Storage Domain, which utilizes Gluster as the storage backend for improved VM performance.
· Gluster Hooks Management, which allows users to manage volume lifecycle extensions directly from the oVirt engine.

Automation Features
New features for automation include the oVirt scheduler API, where users may implement their own private optimized scheduling algorithms; external tasks support, allowing third-party plugins to inject tasks into the oVirt Engine through the REST API; a Java-SDK development kit automatically generated for the oVirt Engine; and Backup-Restore API Integration, allowing third party software providers to backup and restore virtual machines at the hypervisor level.

oVirt 3.3 offers more than 40 new features. A complete feature list can be found on the oVirt community website here. The oVirt community blogs are another resource for developers to learn about integrating KVM into their workloads.