Chapter 6. Hosts
6.1. Introduction to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hosts
Hosts, also known as hypervisors, are the physical servers on which virtual machines run. Full virtualization is provided by using a loadable Linux kernel module called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
KVM can concurrently host multiple virtual machines running either Windows or Linux operating systems. Virtual machines run as individual Linux processes and threads on the host machine and are managed remotely by the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. A Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment has one or more hosts attached to it.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization supports two methods of installing hosts. You can use the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor installation media, or install hypervisor packages on a standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hosts take advantage of tuned profiles, which provide virtualization optimizations. For more information on tuned, please refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Performance Tuning Guide.
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor has security features enabled. Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and the iptables firewall are fully configured and on by default. The Manager can open required ports on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts when it adds them to the environment. For a full list of ports, see Virtualization Host Firewall Requirements.
A host is a physical 64-bit server with the Intel VT or AMD-V extensions running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 or later AMD64/Intel 64 version.
Important
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 machines that belong to existing clusters are supported. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Guest Agent is now included in the
virtio serial channel. Any Guest Agents installed on Windows guests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts will lose their connection to the Manager when the Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts are upgraded from version 5 to version 6.
A physical host on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform:
- Must belong to only one cluster in the system.
- Must have CPUs that support the AMD-V or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions.
- Must have CPUs that support all functionality exposed by the virtual CPU type selected upon cluster creation.
- Has a minimum of 2 GB RAM.
- Can have an assigned system administrator with system permissions.
Administrators can receive the latest security advisories from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization watch list. Subscribe to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization watch list to receive new security advisories for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products by email. Subscribe by completing this form:
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