Welcome to Ganeti’s documentation!

This page is the starting point for browsing the Ganeti documentation. Below, the corpus of Ganeti documentation is grouped by topic.

A few quick references:

  • Glossary: Provides explanations of basic Ganeti terminology.

  • News file: Lists changes between Ganeti versions.

  • Search Page: Allows you to search for key terms across Ganeti documentation.

Installing Ganeti

Use the following resources to install and/or upgrade Ganeti:

Using Ganeti

The following resources provide guidance on how to use Ganeti:

  • Ganeti administrator’s guide: Information about how to manage a Ganeti cluster after it is installed (including management of nodes and instances, and information about Ganeti’s tools and monitoring agent).

  • Ganeti walk-through: An example-oriented guide to Ganeti.

  • Man pages: Descriptions of the various tools that are part of Ganeti.

  • Security in Ganeti: A description of the security model underlying a Ganeti cluster.

  • Ganeti customisation using hooks: Information on hooking scripts, which extend Ganeti functionalities by automatically activating when certain events occur.

  • Ganeti automatic instance allocation: Description of the API for external tools, which can allocate instances either manually or automatically.

  • Ganeti remote API: Description of the Ganeti remote API, which allows programmatic access to most of the functionalities of Ganeti.

  • OVF converter: Description of a tool that provides compatibility with the standard OVF virtual machine interchange format.

  • Virtual cluster support: Explanation of how to use virtual cluster support, which is utilized mainly for testing reasons.

Some features are explicitly targeted for large Ganeti installations, in which multiple clusters are present:

Developing Ganeti

There are a few documents particularly useful for developers who want to modify Ganeti:

  • Ganeti locking: Describes Ganeti’s locking strategy and lock order dependencies.

  • Developer notes: Details build dependencies and other useful development-related information.

Implemented designs

Before actual implementation, all Ganeti features are described in a design document. Designs fall into two categories: released versions and draft versions (which are either incomplete or not implemented).

Draft designs