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This section lists some of the important terms used in Oracle Linux KVM.
The data center is a high-level logical entity for all physical and logical resources in the environment. After the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager is installed, a default data center is created automatically. The user can initialize a data center by adding a cluster, a host, and a storage domain.
The cluster is a logical grouping of one or more Oracle Linux KVM hosts on which VMs can run. Oracle Linux KVM hosts in a cluster must share the same storage domains and need to have the same CPU type (either Intel or AMD). Each cluster belongs to a data center and each Oracle Linux KVM host belongs to a cluster.
Virtual machines are dynamically allocated to any Oracle Linux KVM host in the cluster and can be migrated between them. Even when one of the hosts is unavailable, the virtual machine can be started in any available host.
On a bare-metal server, after installation of Oracle Linux, the server can be used as the Oracle Linux KVM hypervisor in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and host virtual machines. All the hosts in such an environment should be Oracle Linux KVM hosts. Dell Technologies recommends running the engine on a separate Oracle Linux host, rather than as a VM in the KVM setup. Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager can manage many Oracle Linux KVM hosts, each of which can run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. Each VM runs as individual Linux processes and threads on the Oracle Linux KVM host.
VMs can be created new or cloned from an existing template in the virtual machine pools. A virtual machine pool is a group of on-demand virtual machines that are all clones of the same template. The template is a copy of a virtual machine that can be used to repeat the creation of a similar virtual machine.
The virtualization manager uses the centralized storage system for virtual machine disk images and ISO files. The protocols iSCSI, FC, and NFS are all supported, along with POSIX compliant FS and GlusterFS. A data center cannot be initialized unless a storage domain is attached to it and activated. A storage domain contains complete images of templates, virtual images, virtual machine snapshots, or ISO files.
The following high-level networking is recommended:
The Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager host and all Oracle Linux KVM hosts must have a fully qualified domain name (FQDN).
The guest agent runs inside the virtual machine and provides information about resource usage to the engine. It provides the information, notifications, and actions between the engine and the guest.
For detailed minimum and maximum system requirements and scalability limitations, see the Oracle documentation.