Architecture Overview

Gallium is a cloud-managed virtualization platform. You install the Gallium Hypervisor on your own servers, on premises or from a bare metal provider, and manage every deployment from the Gallium Console in the cloud.

The hypervisor does not depend on the Console to keep running. Each hypervisor carries its own local control plane, so your virtual machines keep running, restart after a reboot, and fail over in a cluster whether or not the cloud is reachable. The data inside them never leaves your hardware.

Gallium Console

The Console is how you manage and operate your infrastructure. From one place you can see and change everything across every deployment: clusters, hypervisors, virtual machines, networks, and storage. It stores the templates you build VMs from and delivers them on demand. It manages users and their roles. Every action is written to an audit log, and alerts are raised when something needs attention.

Gallium Hypervisor

The hypervisor is a purpose built operating system installed onto your chosen server. It comes in two variants, one for Edge and a second for Cluster or Standalone.

The hypervisor connects out to the Console and accepts no inbound connections. There is no local management interface on the hypervisor. This means there is no local account attack surface to defend.

Local Control Plane

Every hypervisor carries a local control plane. It applies the configuration it received from the Console, manages storage and networking, and auto-starts VMs when the hypervisor boots. None of this depends on the cloud, and all of it survives a hypervisor reboot.

On Edge and Standalone, the local control plane lives on the hypervisor itself. In a cluster, it runs on designated hypervisors that hold the Control Plane role. Failover and disk pool replication are decided there, so high availability keeps working when the cloud is unreachable.

Running Without Internet

A hypervisor that cannot reach the Console keeps running everything normally until connectivity resumes. The hypervsior can tolerate the loss of connectivity for extended periods, including through reboots, but should be connected by default. Gallium is not suitable deployment in air-gapped environments.

Where Your Data Lives

Because the local control plane and your workloads run on your hardware, the contents of your virtual machines stay there. The Console only holds the metadata that describes your infrastructure. For the full breakdown, see Data Locality.