In Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, a self-hosted engine is a virtualized environment where the engine runs inside a virtual machine on the hosts in the environment. The virtual machine for the engine is created as part of the host configuration process. And, the engine is installed and configured in parallel to the host configuration.

Because the engine runs as a virtual machine and not on physical hardware, a self-hosted engine requires less physical resources. Also, because the engine is configured to be highly available, if the host running the Engine virtual machine goes into maintenance mode or fails, the virtual machine is migrated automatically to another host in the environment. A minimum of two KVM hosts are required.

To review conceptual information, troubleshooting, and administration tasks, see the oVirt Self-Hosted Engine Guide in oVirt Documentation.

To deploy a self-hosted engine, you perform a fresh installation of Oracle Linux 8.8 or later (8.x), or 9.6 or later (9.x) on the host, install the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager Release 4.5 package, and then run the hosted engine deployment tool to complete configuration.

You can also deploy a self-hosted engine using the command line or Cockpit portal. To use the command line, proceed to Use Command Line to Deploy Self-Hosted Engine. To use the Cockpit portal, proceed to Use Cockpit to Deploy Self-Hosted Engine.

If you're required to be compliant with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), you can enable FIPS mode for the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager deployment. See FIPS Mode Deployment in the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager: Getting Started guide.