Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager provides a Representational State Transfer (REST) API. The API provides software developers and system administrators with control over their Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment outside of the standard web interface. The REST API is useful for developers and administrators who aim to integrate the functionality of a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment with custom scripts or client-side applications that are able to send Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests and interpret responses.
Other benefits of the REST API include:
The ability to customize features of your Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.
The potential to automatically complete tasks, such a system maintenance and error checking.
Repetitive tasks in a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment are completed with simple scripts.
The API is cross-platform and any system that accesses HTTP fulfils the basic requirements to access the REST API.
This documentation acts as a reference to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager REST API. It aims to provide developers and administrators with instructions and examples to help harness the functionality of their Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment through the REST API.
Explaining the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager REST API requires an examination of REST architectural style and RESTful web services in the context of a virtualization environment. The following sections provide an overview of REST architecture through explanations of the key REST terms.
A REST API focuses primarily on resources of a specific service. A resource is a key abstraction of information and in the context of virtualization represents an individual component, capability or data set in the virtualizaion infrastructure.
