Introduction to Cockpit
Welcome to the official technical documentation for Cockpit, the centralized management platform and multi-host orchestrator for the Vapor virtualization ecosystem.
Cockpit serves as the central control plane of your virtualized server environment. It connects multiple individual Vapor hosts and presents them in a single, unified interface for administration.
Key Architecture
- Vapor: A localized virtualization agent running directly on individual physical hosts to control virtual machines, local storage pools, and network devices.
- Cockpit: A cluster-level management gateway that coordinates multiple Vapor nodes, aggregates metrics, enforces access policies, and orchestrates distributed resources.
Capabilities of Cockpit
While a single Vapor server runs its own virtual machines, Cockpit coordinates them as a unified cluster, transforming separate physical servers into a managed private cloud infrastructure.
Key features include:
- Centralized Cluster Orchestration: Connect, synchronize, and monitor all physical hypervisor nodes running Vapor from a single management console.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Define granular user accounts and user groups, mapping them to specific privileges and administrative scopes.
- Live Workload Migration: Transfer running virtual machines and virtual disks between physical hosts with zero downtime.
- Real-Time System Telemetry: Stream real-time performance metrics and alerts using WebSocket connections to monitor hypervisor and virtual machine health.
- Enterprise Identity Integration: Integrate authentication with Active Directory, LDAP, or SAML 2.0 Single Sign-On (SSO) providers.
Documentation Directory
Explore the specific guides and documentation topics to administer your cluster:
- Getting Started: System architecture, communication protocols, and hardware requirements.
- Installation & Setup: Procedures to install Cockpit, configure the PostgreSQL database, and register physical hosts.
- Access Control: Configuring user accounts, roles, privileges, LDAP/AD integrations, and SSO.
- Cluster Management: Host claiming, transactional advisory locks, and state synchronization pipelines.
- Virtual Machines: Provisioning, lifecycle management, live migrations, backups, DRS & HA, and Kubernetes.
- Networking: Configuring standard bridges and cluster-level distributed networks.
- Storage: Managing local and shared storage pools (directory, NFS, LVM, OCFS2).
- Alerts & Auditing: Threshold rules, email/SNMP alerts, and security audit log forwarding.
- Monitoring: Centralized telemetry dashboards and WebSocket event hub streaming.
- Terraform Provider: Automating resource provisioning with Infrastructure as Code.
- CLI Reference: Using the command-line interface for administrative and setup tasks.
- REST API Reference: Integrating external systems via the JSON REST API.
- Troubleshooting: Common troubleshooting workflows for connection losses, TLS issues, and lock conflicts.