PVC is a virtual machine-based hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) virtualization cluster solution that is fully Free Software, scalable, redundant, self-healing, self-managing, and designed for administrator simplicity. It is an alternative to other HCI solutions such as Harvester, Nutanix, and VMWare, as well as to other common virtualization stacks such as ProxMox and OpenStack.
PVC is a complete HCI solution, built from well-known and well-trusted Free Software tools, to assist an administrator in creating and managing a cluster of servers to run virtual machines, as well as self-managing several important aspects including storage failover, node failure and recovery, virtual machine failure and recovery, and network plumbing. It is designed to act consistently, reliably, and unobtrusively, letting the administrator concentrate on more important things.
PVC is highly scalable. From a minimum (production) node count of 3, up to 12 or more, and supporting many dozens of VMs, PVC scales along with your workload and requirements. Deploy a cluster once and grow it as your needs expand.
As a consequence of its features, PVC makes administrating very high-uptime VMs extremely easy, featuring VM live migration, built-in always-enabled shared storage with transparent multi-node replication, and consistent network plumbing throughout the cluster. Nodes can also be seamlessly removed from or added to service, with zero VM downtime, to facilitate maintenance, upgrades, or other work.
PVC also features an optional, fully customizable VM provisioning framework, designed to automate and simplify VM deployments using custom provisioning profiles, scripts, and CloudInit userdata API support.
Installation of PVC is accomplished by two main components: a [Node installer ISO](https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster/pvc-installer) which creates on-demand installer ISOs, and an [Ansible role framework](https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster/pvc-ansible) to configure, bootstrap, and administrate the nodes. Once up, the cluster is managed via an HTTP REST API, accessible via a Python Click CLI client or WebUI.
Just give it physical servers, and it will run your VMs without you having to think about it, all in just an hour or two of setup time.
## What is it based on?
The core node and API daemons, as well as the CLI API client, are written in Python 3 and are fully Free Software (GNU GPL v3). In addition to these, PVC makes use of the following software tools to provide a holistic hyperconverged infrastructure solution:
* Debian GNU/Linux as the base OS.
* Linux KVM, QEMU, and Libvirt for VM management.
* Linux `ip`, FRRouting, NFTables, DNSMasq, and PowerDNS for network management.
* Ceph for storage management.
* Apache Zookeeper for the primary cluster state database.
* Patroni PostgreSQL manager for the secondary relation databases (DNS aggregation, Provisioner configuration).
To get started with PVC, please see the [About](https://parallelvirtualcluster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/) page for general information about the project, and the [Getting Started](https://parallelvirtualcluster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started/) page for details on configuring your first cluster.
While PVC's API and internals aren't very screenshot-worthy, here is some example output of the CLI tool.
<p><imgalt="Node listing"src="docs/images/pvc-nodes.png"/><br/><i>Listing the nodes in a cluster</i></p>
<p><imgalt="Network listing"src="docs/images/pvc-networks.png"/><br/><i>Listing the networks in a cluster, showing 3 bridged and 1 IPv4-only managed networks</i></p>
<p><imgalt="VM listing and migration"src="docs/images/pvc-migration.png"/><br/><i>Listing a limited set of VMs and migrating one with status updates</i></p>
<p><imgalt="Node logs"src="docs/images/pvc-nodelog.png"/><br/><i>Viewing the logs of a node (keepalives and VM [un]migration)</i></p>
* [Node Daemon] Fixes several bugs and crashes in node daemon
* [General] Updates linting rules for newer Flake8 linter
* [Daemons/CLI client] Adds VM network and disk hot attach/detach support; NOTE: Changes the default behaviour of `pvc vm network add`/`remove` and `pvc vm volume add`/`remove`
* [API Daemon] Adds checks for pool size when resizing volumes
* [API Daemon] Adds checks for RAM and vCPU sizes when defining or modifying VMs
* [Node Daemon] Adjusts log text of VM migrations to show the correct source node
* [API Daemon] Adjusts the OVA importer to support floppy RASD types for compatability
* [API Daemon] Ensures that volume resize commands without a suffix get B appended
* [API Daemon] Removes the explicit setting of image-features in PVC; defaulting to the limited set has been moved to the ceph.conf configuration on nodes via PVC Ansible
* [Node Daemon] Removes Rados module polling of Ceph cluster and returns to command-based polling for timeout purposes, and removes some flaky return statements
Numerous small improvements and bugfixes. This release is suitable for general use and is pre-release-quality software.
This release introduces an updated version scheme; all future stable releases until 1.0.0 is ready will be made under this 0.9.z naming. This does not represent semantic versioning and all changes (feature, improvement, or bugfix) will be considered for inclusion in this release train.
Numerous improvements and bugfixes, full implementation of the provisioner, full implementation of the API CLI client (versus direct CLI client). This release is suitable for general use and is beta-quality software.
First public release; fully implements the VM, network, and storage managers, the HTTP API, and the pvc-ansible framework for deploying and bootstrapping a cluster. This release is suitable for general use, though it is still alpha-quality software and should be expected to change significantly until 1.0 is released.
