Terminology and goals

To avoid ambiguity about the terms used, here are the definitions for some of the specific concepts used in libvirt documentation:

Now we can define the goal of libvirt: to provide a common and stable layer sufficient to securely manage domains on a node, possibly remote.

As a result, libvirt should provide all APIs needed to do the management, such as: provision, create, modify, monitor, control, migrate and stop the domains - within the limits of the support of the hypervisor for those operations. Not all hypervisors provide the same operations; but if an operation is useful for domain management of even one specific hypervisor it is worth providing in libvirt. Multiple nodes may be accessed with libvirt simultaneously, but the APIs are limited to single node operations. Node resource operations which are needed for the management and provisioning of domains are also in the scope of the libvirt API, such as interface setup, firewall rules, storage management and general provisioning APIs. Libvirt will also provide the state monitoring APIs needed to implement management policies, obviously checking domain state but also exposing local node resource consumption.

This implies the following sub-goals:

So libvirt is intended to be a building block for higher level management tools and for applications focusing on virtualization of a single node (the only exception being domain migration between node capabilities which involves more than one node).