The virtualization environment is a critical IT infrastructure for your company. Before installing ZStack ZSphere, carefully read and follow the configuration requirements to prepare your hardware and software environment. Improper environment configuration may prevent you from completing subsequent environment deployment or lead to issues during use.

As shown in Figure 1, the typical virtualization environment is built on a small data center. This environment consists of several servers with different functions and two independent network environments.

Two of the servers are used as the ZStack ZSphere management node and the image storage for virtual machine images (in a small data center, you can use a single server for both the management node and image storage; in a large physical environment, you can configure dual management node for high availability and multiple image storage servers to expand storage capacity and throughput). The remaining servers act as physical hosts for virtual machines.

Each server connects to both the management network and the data network, with the data network providing internet access through a firewall. The management network is used for managing virtualization resources such as hosts, virtual machines, and disks, while the data network is dedicated to providing data services for virtual machines.

Note: The NICs on servers connected to the data network do not need to have specified IP addresses, but the NIC names for each server connected to the data network must be the same (for example, all should be eth0).