Omer Frenkel

This talk will cover * a short intro to ovirt * a bit about the code contribution effort by eldorado.org research center that made this happen * design consideration of multi arch support - objectives and constraints * basic flow for provisioning PPC enabled clusters * some code, config files etc to demonstrate what ties it up altogether

Target audience: Whoever is interested in data-center virtualization in general, ovirt-engine specifically, and PPC support.

Getting cross-platform: bringing virtualization management to the PPC world oVirt, the open source data center virtualization management solution is expanding the x86_64 architecture support to PowerPC hardware, among them IBM Power processor based hosts.

Entering PPC world raises challenges of managing mixed arch data-centers with the need to distinguish PPC from x86_64 VMs. In this session we'll cover the main differences in virtualization needs, how we enabled the support for that in our management engine(a.k.a ovirt-engine)

PPC virtualization main differences is in virtualized devices supports. Built around x8664, ovirt-engine needed to expand its cluster and VMs provisioning to fit multi architecture, and to keep migration support and proper VM configuration solid for the supported operating systems. Since some parts are work in progress (e.g live migration) for the PPC VDSM, the engine has to also manage features which are not supported for PPC while is supported for x8664

To cope with a change that span various parts and components a repository for Operating Systems and they're hipervisor's demands was created along with strategy functions around the code to ensure correct provisions and life cycle related VM functions.

The session will cover what is now supported (hypervisor and VM OSs), how we provision PPC clusters and VMs and a little deeper dive to explore the mechanisms which enabled this multi-platform support along with some code examples (yes, we're going to see some code!)

The oVirt project is an open virtualization project providing virtualization management with advanced capabilities. The oVirt Engine Core is the main component responsible of managing all business logic and entities from physical hosts, data-centers, users and virtual machines. In the session, an overview of the the engine infrastructure will be given, with explanations of the internals – main components that build the engine, their roles and how they work together. The session should make the audience familiar with the project and give a basic understanding of the building blocks.