Hypervisors

OpenStack Compute supports many hypervisors, which might make it difficult for you to choose one. Most installations use only one hypervisor. However, you can use ComputeFilter and ImagePropertiesFilter to schedule different hypervisors within the same installation. The following links help you choose a hypervisor. See Feature Support Matrix for a detailed list of features and support across the hypervisors.

The following hypervisors are supported:

  • KVM - Kernel-based Virtual Machine. The virtual disk formats that it supports is inherited from QEMU since it uses a modified QEMU program to launch the virtual machine. The supported formats include raw images, the qcow2, and VMware formats.

  • LXC - Linux Containers (through libvirt), used to run Linux-based virtual machines.

  • QEMU - Quick EMUlator, generally only used for development purposes.

  • VMware vSphere 5.1.0 and newer - Runs VMware-based Linux and Windows images through a connection with a vCenter server.

  • Xen (using libvirt) - Xen Project Hypervisor using libvirt as management interface into nova-compute to run Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and NetBSD virtual machines.

  • XenServer - XenServer, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and other XAPI based Xen variants runs Linux or Windows virtual machines. You must install the nova-compute service in a para-virtualized VM.

  • Hyper-V - Server virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V, use to run Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD virtual machines. Runs nova-compute natively on the Windows virtualization platform.

  • Virtuozzo 7.0.0 and newer - OS Containers and Kernel-based Virtual Machines supported via libvirt virt_type=parallels. The supported formats include ploop and qcow2 images.

  • PowerVM - Server virtualization with IBM PowerVM for AIX, IBM i, and Linux workloads on the Power Systems platform.

  • zVM - Server virtualization on z Systems and IBM LinuxONE, it can run Linux, z/OS and more.

  • UML - User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes.

  • Ironic - OpenStack project which provisions bare metal (as opposed to virtual) machines.