Last week, the oVirt Project delivered a new version of its open source virtualization management system, complete with a feature I’ve eagerly awaited for the past two years. The feature, called Hosted Engine, enables oVirt admins to host the system’s management server (aka the engine) on one of the virtualization hosts it manages.

While oVirt was designed to run across separate management and virtualization hosts, it’s been possible from early on (version 3.0) to hack up a machine to serve both roles. In subsequent releases, the project approved and refined this installation option into an easy-to-use All-in-One (AIO) installation plugin.

The problem with AIO is that it leaves you with one of your most important workloads (the oVirt engine) stuck running on a single piece of hardware, where it can’t easily be moved around – a very un-virt scenario. Hosted Engine gives those of us interested in getting oVirt rolling on a single server a new deployment option, and one that promises to scale out more nicely than possible with the AIO plugin.

In this post, I’m going to walk through the installation and first steps of a basic oVirt install using the Hosted Engine feature.

via Up and Running with oVirt 3.4 — Red Hat Open Source Community.