Architecture
Virtual Machine as a Service (VMaaS) is a cloud-based offering that enables Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to provision and manage virtual machines (VMs) on demand. The reference architecture provides a standardized framework to implement VMaaS, ensuring consistent operations, scalability, and tenant isolation.
The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of the platform. It showcases how tenants operate within isolated virtual machines and interact with key platform services such as VM-as-a-Service (VMaaS), PaaS, Inventory, and Monitoring. These services are managed by the Rafay Controller and run on an underlying infrastructure layer composed of servers, networking, and storage.
Bare Metal Hypervisor¶
Rafay's VM as a Servuce offering uses mature and battle tested Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as the underlying technology. KVM is a software feature on bare metal Linux servers to create virtual machines. KVM can turn any Linux machine into a bare-metal hypervisor. It frees server administrators from manually provisioning virtualization infrastructure and allows large numbers of virtual machines to be deployed easily in cloud environments. Some of the benefits of KVM are:
High performance¶
KVM is engineered to manage high-demanding applications seamlessly. All guest operating systems inherit the high performance of the host operating system—Linux. The KVM hypervisor also allows virtualization to be performed as close as possible to the server hardware, which further reduces process latency.
Security¶
Virtual machines running on KVM enjoy security features native to the Linux operating system, including Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). This ensures that all virtual environments strictly adhere to their respective security boundaries to strengthen data privacy and governance.
Stability¶
KVM has been widely used in business applications for more than a decade. It enjoys excellent support from a thriving open-source community. The source code that powers KVM is mature and provides a stable foundation for enterprise applications.
Cost efficiency¶
KVM is free and open source, which means businesses do not have to pay additional licensing fees to host virtual machines.
Flexibility¶
KVM provides businesses many options during installations, as it works with various hardware setups. Server administrators can efficiently allocate additional CPU, storage, or memory to a virtual machine with KVM. KVM also supports thin provisioning, which only provides the resources to the virtual machine when needed.
