> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.platform9.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.platform9.com/managed-openstack/infrastructure/host-management/infrastructure-host.md).

# What is a Host

A **Host** is a physical machine that you supply to your PMO cloud as a hypervisor. Once configured, workloads are then deployed as virtual machines on top of the hosts.

## Roles

To best utilize your resources in PMO and to run a production setup, you need to configure your hosts to perform specific functions. You do this by assigning different `roles` to different hosts.

When you onboard a new host in PMO by installing the Platform9 agent, the host shows up in the PMO UI as awaiting authorization. At this point, you get the choice of assigning one of the following roles to the host:

| Role          | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Hypervisor    | A host with this role will be utilized by PMO to schedule your virtual machine workloads on.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| Image Library | Utilized to host the Glance image library. The host must have sufficient storage avaialble to host virtual machine images. You can create a highly available image library configuration by assigning the image library role to multiple hosts.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| Block Storage | Utilized to integrate with Cinder block storage by using drivers like Ceph, SolidFire, NFS, LVM, NetApp, and QNAP.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| Network Node  | Utilized as a network node. The host will be be deployed with the required Neutron agents and software-defined networking (SDN) components so that the host can perform virtual routing and other needed functionality. You can configure multiple nodes to have a networking role. Alternatively, you can also configure your environment with Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR) where each host will act as a router in addition to any other roles that might be assigned to that host. |

{% hint style="info" %}
**Note**

You can assign more than one role to a host. For a production setup, we recommend that you designate separate sets of hosts for separate roles.
{% endhint %}


---

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