Documentation

oVirt

oVirt is the open-source management platform for KVM. One engine sits in front of every host, and Provibr talks to that engine over its REST API. If you have read the Proxmox page, the model is the same: an agent in your network, an integration pointing at the engine, a plan, and a template to clone from. This page covers what is different.

How it differs from Proxmox

Both are hypervisors and both deliver the same kind of resource, so plans, capacity, IP pools and the audit trail work exactly as they do for Proxmox. The differences are in how a machine is addressed and placed.

There is no node to choose and no ID range to hand out. The engine picks a host inside the cluster itself, and it mints the identifier of a machine: a UUID, not a vmid. If you are used to Proxmox, those two fields are missing on purpose.

What you fill in

An oVirt integration points at the engine, not at a host. Four values, all of them required:

The engine address as you open it in the browser, for example https://ovirt.example.com. Anything after the host name is dropped; the agent builds the API path itself.
The user name including its authorisation profile, for example provibr@internal.
That user's password.
The SHA-256 fingerprint of the certificate the engine presents.

oVirt has no API token that can be revoked or limited to part of the API, so what the agent holds is a full account password. That makes the role on the account the only boundary there is: create a separate user for Provibr and give it a role scoped to the cluster it manages, rather than using admin@internal.

The TLS fingerprint

An oVirt engine serves a certificate signed by its own internal CA. Read its fingerprint from any machine that can reach the engine:

shell

openssl s_client -connect <host>:443 </dev/null 2>/dev/null | \
  openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha256

Commands and terminal output are in English everywhere, in the panel and in these pages. One text, one truth: what you read here is literally what your host will print back.

This field is required and stays required. There is no publicly trusted chain to fall back on and no unencrypted path, so the agent trusts that one certificate and nothing else. If you replace the engine certificate, replace the fingerprint here as well.

Cluster, storage and network

Three settings tell the engine where to build. They live on the integration and apply to every machine ordered through it:

Cluster: where new machines land. The engine picks a host inside it.
Storage domain: where the disk of a new machine is created.
vNIC profile: what the network card of a new machine is attached to.

Templates

A machine is built by cloning an oVirt template, exactly as it is on Proxmox. Link a template to an operating system in your catalogue and every plan that offers that system will clone it.

Network installation over PXE is not available for oVirt. Cloning a template is the only way a machine is created here.

What you can do with a machine

Create, start, stop, shut down, suspend, resume and remove. Grow a disk or add one, attach or detach a network card, open the console, and read the usage graphs.

Reinstalling does not exist for oVirt. On Proxmox that command wipes a machine and clones the template again onto the same ID; oVirt has no equivalent, so the button is not there. Remove the machine and order a new one instead.

Addresses and the firewall

Addresses work as they do everywhere in Provibr: a plan ties cores, memory and disk to an address pool, ordering takes the next free address and writes it into the machine's cloud-init settings, and removing the machine releases it again.

There is no per-machine firewall. Proxmox can hold an ipset per machine and Provibr keeps it in step with the addresses it handed out; oVirt has nothing of the kind, so that tab does not appear.

Machines that already exist

Machines already running on your engine can be imported into the panel. They keep their identifier, they start counting towards your capacity, and from then on they are managed like any other machine.

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