Administration

Virtual machines

The VM is the centre of the platform, and its whole lifecycle lives in one place: create from an image or template, resize, snapshot, clone, migrate, retire. A few details that matter in practice:

Live migration moves a running VM between hosts with no interruption. Because storage is shared, only memory state moves — it's quick and safe to do at 2 PM.
Snapshots capture a point in time; scheduled snapshot policies keep a rolling window automatically. Application-consistent mode briefly quiesces the guest so databases come back clean.
Templates are versioned. Update a template and you can still trace which VMs came from which version.
Placement is automatic by default. Affinity and anti-affinity rules pin VMs together or keep them apart (for example, two database replicas on different hosts). A dynamic balancer can spread load continuously if you let it.
High availability restarts a failed host's VMs elsewhere. Admission control refuses new workloads that would eat the failover headroom — better to hear "no" at creation time than at 3 AM.

Networking

Networks are defined in software and exist instantly across every host:

Virtual networks with built-in address management and optional routers between them.
Security groups — per-VM firewall rules, applied at the virtual port, managed as named policies.
Load balancers distribute traffic across a set of VMs with health checks.
Floating IPs give a VM a stable public-facing address you can move between VMs in one action.
VLANs map virtual networks onto your physical network segments where you need them to meet the outside world.
Port mirroring copies a VM's traffic to an analysis VM — invaluable for debugging and security work.

Storage

Datastores organise the cluster pool into named areas with their own placement and quota policies. Most installations use one default datastore and stop thinking about it.
Volumes are standalone disks you attach to and detach from VMs as needed.
External storage — existing NFS shares and block-storage arrays can be attached alongside the built-in pool, useful during transitions or for special workloads.
Quotas cap how much storage a tenant or project can consume.

Containers and Kubernetes

Containers run beside VMs on the same hosts and networks — handy for small services that don't deserve a whole VM. For teams that want the full ecosystem, the platform provisions complete Kubernetes clusters: pick a size, get a working cluster with access credentials a few minutes later.

Tenants, projects and quotas

Tenants are hard boundaries: separate users, separate resources, separate networks. Projects subdivide a tenant for teams or applications. Quotas — CPU, memory, storage, network resources — apply at either level. The combination lets one cluster serve many masters without anyone stepping on anyone else.