A self-hosted engine is a virtualized environment in which the engine, or Manager, runs on a virtual machine on the hosts managed by that engine. The virtual machine is created as part of the host configuration, and the engine is installed and configured in parallel to that host configuration process, referred to in these procedures as the deployment.

The virtual machine running the engine is created to be highly available. This means that if the host running the virtual machine goes into maintenance mode, or fails unexpectedly, the virtual machine will be migrated automatically to another host in the environment.

The primary benefit of the self-hosted engine is that it requires less hardware to deploy an instance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the engine runs as a virtual machine, not on physical hardware. Additionally, the engine is configured to be highly available automatically, rather than requiring a separate cluster.

The self-hosted engine can run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors. Older versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not recommended for use with the self-hosted engine.

This chapter contains information about running a self-hosted engine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts. For information on running a self-hosted engine on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors, see Section 7.6.15, “The Hosted Engine Screen”.