In the world of Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, three essential portals stand ready to assist you in every aspect of managing your virtual environment. They are the administration portal, VM portal, and the monitoring portal.
Let us start with the administration portal. Let’s picture the administration portal as a nerve center of your virtual infrastructure. Accessible through any web browser, the administrators can wield the power tools to oversee, create, maintain every component of their virtual ecosystem.
Within this portal, we can create and manage virtual infrastructures. From defining intricate network configurations, to managing storage domains, administrators have full control over the foundational elements that support their virtual environment.
Installation and management of hosts. Whether it’s setting up new hosts or fine tuning existing ones, administrators can efficiently manage the entire life cycle of their host, ensuring they operate at peak performance.
Creation and management of logical entities. By creating and managing data centers and clusters, administrators can organize resources effectively, optimizing the resource allocation, enhancing the scalability.
Creation and management of virtual machines. From creation to fine tuning, administrators can manage every aspect of their virtual machines, tailoring them to meet the specific workload requirements.
User and permission management. Ensuring secure access and proper delegation of responsibilities is crucial to the administration portal. Administrator can manage user accounts and permissions with ease, maintaining a robust security posture.
Now let’s talk about the next portal, which is the VM portal. The VM portal is specially designed to cater to users who primarily engage with virtual machines within the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager environment. It serves as a user friendly interface, offering a seamless experience for accessing virtual machines and conducting fundamental management tasks, like creating, editing, and removing virtual machines, or stopping, starting, and migrating virtual machines, all with minimal effort.
Within the VM portal, users are greeted with a comprehensive overview of their virtual machines. This dashboard-like interface allows users to perform various actions, providing them with a holistic view and control over their virtualized assets. Users can initiate a range of operations, including starting, stopping, editing, configuring, and accessing detailed information about each virtual machine.
The capabilities available to users within the VM portal are determined and managed by system administrators. Administrators have the authority to delegate additional administrative tasks to users based on the roles and responsibilities.
These delegated tasks may encompass creating, modifying, or removing virtual machines, allowing users to customize their virtualized environments to meet specific requirements, managing virtual disks and network interfaces, enabling users to configure storage, networking and setting the networks according to their needs, leveraging snapshots to create in time backups of virtual machines, facilitating quick recovery and rollback to previous states in case of unforeseen issues.
Furthermore, the VM portal will also facilitate direct connections to virtual machines through VNC clients. And these clients provide users with a familiar desktop-like environment, enhancing the user experience by enabling seamless interactions with their virtual machines. The choice of protocol can be VNC or Spice for connecting to a virtual machine, which can be determined by the administrators during the virtual machine creation process.
Now let’s talk about the next type of portal, which is the monitoring portal. So the monitoring portal is a powerful tool with Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager that empowers administrators with comprehensive monitoring capabilities. With a suit of advanced tools and virtualization at their disposal, administrators can effectively monitor the health and performance of their virtualized infrastructure by closely tracking key metrics and swiftly identifying potential issues.
Administrators can make informed decisions to optimize performance and reliability, ensuring smooth operations across the board. Furthermore, the Linux Virtualization Manager offers enhanced reporting and monitoring capabilities through seamless integration with Grafana, a leading open source analytics platform.
This integration provides administrators with access to a wealth of insightful data stored in the engine data warehouse. With Grafana, administrators can create customized dashboards tailored to their specific monitoring needs. Now, these custom dashboards will act as centralized, offering a real time visibility into critical resources and performance metrics across the virtualized environment. Administrators can effortlessly track key indicators, for example, CPU utilization, memory usage, storage capacity, or network throughput, enabling proactive monitoring and rapid response to potential issues.
The Grafana initiative interface and robust visualization tools allow administrators to craft dashboards that provide comprehensive insights at a glance, whether it’s monitoring the health of individual hosts, or tracking the performance of virtual machines, or even analyzing the trends over time. So with Grafana and Linux Virtualization Manager gets empowered for administrators to make data driven decisions and ensure optimal operations of their virtual infrastructure.
The cockpit web interface, which is actually a valuable tool that empowers users to monitor the resources of a KVM host and perform various administrative tasks. Cockpit needs to be installed and activated separately to leverage its functionality. Once installed, users can use this cockpit web interface in multiple ways, and they can access these cockpit web interfaces through administration portal or by establishing a direct connection to the host.
By utilizing the cockpit web interface, users can gain insight into crucial metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk space, and network activity of the KVM host. This gives the real time monitoring capability, which allows administrators to stay informed about the health and performance of their virtualized environment.
The flexibility of accessing this cockpit web interface from either the administration portal or directly connecting to the host offers a user’s convenience and accessibility. Whether users prefer a centralized management approach through the administration portal or they can have a direct hands-on approach by connecting to the host, cockpit provides a seamless experience for monitoring and managing your KVM host in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager.
Now let’s come down to understanding the virtual machine consoles. So you’ve got two options for providing graphical consoles to your virtual machines. One is virtual network computing, which is also called as VNC, and the remote desktop protocol, which is the RDP. These consoles allow you to work and interact directly with your virtual machine, just as you would with your physical machines.
Now, if you opt with VNC or the remote viewer, you can access the console using either the remote viewer application or the VNC client. To use a locally installed remote viewer application, you can install it via your package manager or download it from the Virtual Machine Manager.
And for a browser based console clients, it is very much important that the certificate authorities should be copied or installed inside your browser. You can get the certificate authority certificate by navigating to your engines or host address with the certificate address, or you can download it from your administration portal login page.
For RDP, which is remote desktop, it is available exclusively for Windows environment. To use RDP, you need to access virtual machines from windows machines with Microsoft Remote Desktop application installed. Additionally, you must set up remote sharing on the virtual machine and configure the firewall to allow remote desktop connections before connecting to a Windows virtual machine using RDP.
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