Architecture for implementing a virtualization environment and appliance

A system, comprising:

• an appliance for implementing a virtualization system comprising compute components and storage components, the appliance having a plurality of serverboards, in which a respective serverboard corresponds to a single node of a plurality of nodes, wherein the single node comprises a hypervisor, one or more virtual machines, a controller virtual machine and one or more local storage devices, wherein the controller virtual machine runs as a virtual machine above the hypervisor and manages storage and I/O activities for the one or more virtual machines, wherein the appliance is rack mountable and the plurality of serverboards are inserted into the appliance, wherein one or more appliances operatively coupled to one another correspond to the virtualization system;
• a plurality of sets of storage units, wherein a set of storage units from the plurality of sets of storage units comprises a local storage device that is locally attached to a corresponding serverboard of a node, and the plurality of sets of storage units comprise a storage cluster that is structured from portions of local storage devices on separate nodes;
• and
• wherein controller virtual machines, from the plurality of nodes in the virtualization system, in communication with each other form a storage pool comprising the plurality of sets of storage units.