Screen capture of the new virtualization overview page

Introduction

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is introducing a Virtualization Overview page with the 4.10 release. This new page provides a sweeping view of your virtualization resources with regards to details, status, and top consumers. Cluster administrators can see this page as the go-to place to quickly glean information about their virtualization cluster. Examining the data provided here, cluster admins will gain insight into the overall health of their virtualization deployment aiding them to determine if intervention is needed to resolve specific issues. To help users easily focus on specific data, the information is broken down and spread unto 8 cards which are Getting started resources, Details, Status, Activity, Running VMs by template, Inventory, Permissions, and Top Consumers. This page is limited only to cluster-admins for the 4.10 release. 

Another noteworthy update for this release is that virtualization is now a top-level navigation item on the OpenShift Container Platform. Formerly a sub-item of Workloads, virtualization will command its own new domain on the main navigation panel. This change was made to improve discoverability, findability and page load time performance. This overview page can be seen as the entry point to OpenShift Virtualization.

Virtualization overview cards

Getting started resources

The Getting started resources card

On the Getting started resources card, you will have quick starts, new blog posts, and operator information, all pertinent to OpenShift Virtualization. This information should be helpful to users who are new to OpenShift Virtualization. Users can dismiss this card altogether to make room for the cards below by clicking on the top right corner icon.


Details

The Details card

The Details card provides service and version information for OpenShift Virtualization. A notification will be displayed when an update to the virtualization operator is available. More operator information can be found by clicking ‘View details’ on the upper right-hand corner of the card.


Status

The Status card

Cluster administrators will see the statuses for virtualization, networking, and pertinent alerts on this card. A green checkmark icon will indicate that everything is good and an orange alert icon means further attention is needed. There is also a scrollable list of real-time status alerts with the option to drilldown for more details via the View details link found on the right of each alert. Alerts can be viewed in depth and managed on the console’s Alerting page which can be accessed via the View alerts link on the top right corner.


Activity

The Activity card

The Activity card provides users with ongoing and recent activities taking place in their cluster. Admins can also keep track of their cluster events such as pod creation or virtual machine migration via this card.    


Running VMs by template

The running VMs by template card

A donut chart with a unique color for each virtual machine template on the Running VMs by Template card gives users a visual breakdown of how many running virtual machines are based on a specific template. The percentage usage of each template is displayed via a tooltip on mouse-hover of each colored section of the chart.


Inventory

The Inventory card

The Inventory card shows the virtualization data broken down by resources and statuses of virtual machines. The resources section shows the total number of active virtual machines, templates, nodes, and networks. The Statuses of VMs section shows current statuses of each virtual machine in the cluster: running, provisioning, starting, migrating, paused, stopping, stopped, terminating and unknown. Users can drill down into each of these by clicking on the number count displayed.        


Permissions

The Permissions card

The Permissions card informs users of their permissions to perform a list of tasks possible based on their credentials on the cluster. By clicking on the ‘Access control’ link, a popup will show the list of tasks with a green checkmark icon next to the tasks they can carry out and an orange alert icon next to those they can not.


Top Consumers

The Top Consumers card

Finally, we have the Top Consumers card which displays the metrics of resources being consumed by VMs only. This data can be viewed by project, virtual machine, or node. The card is sectioned into 6 quadrants allowing a user to create a customized view that shows any preferred combination of resource consumption by a project, a virtual machine, or a node. Here is a table showing the resources that can be monitored for top consumption in OpenShift Virtualization as provided by OpenShift documentation:

Resources monitored for top consumption

Description

CPU

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes consuming the most CPU.

Memory

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes consuming the most memory (in bytes). The unit of display (for example, MiB or GiB) is determined by the size of the resource consumption.

Used filesystem

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes with the highest consumption of filesystems (in bytes). The unit of display (for example, MiB or GiB) is determined by the size of the resource consumption.

Memory swap

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes consuming the most memory pressure when memory is swapped .

vCPU

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes experiencing the maximum wait time (in seconds) for the vCPUs.

Storage throughput

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes with the highest data transfer rate to and from the storage media (in MBps / GBps).

Storage IOPS

Projects, virtual machines, or nodes with the highest amount of storage IOPS (input/output operations per second) over a time period.

Resource consumption can be viewed by either top 5 or top 10 consumers within each quadrant. This choice can be selected from a dropdown at the top-right corner of this card. The View virtualization dashboard link next to this dropdown will take users to the Virtualization dashboard on another page. This dashboard page also shows data on resource consumption for VMs. Additionally, this page offers more granularity on resource consumption over a selected period of time. Users can also get more information for each graph by clicking the “Inspect” link next to it. 

Summary

The virtualization overview page is a welcomed enhancement to OpenShift Virtualization, in addition to other improvements that come with the 4.10 release. A few things to note are that virtualization is now a top-level navigation item and is no longer a subcategory of Workloads. This new page provides virtualization cluster-admins with a comprehensive view of virtualization resources, operator details, and consumption metrics. They now have insight into the overall health of their virtualization cluster. Examining this data allows them to determine where and how their intervention is needed.

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