Introduction

This page is a structural placeholder. It will be replaced with real product detail once the corresponding feature has shipped and been verified against running hosts.

Ballast is a control plane and distributed agent for managing Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters. It stores declarative desired state centrally and runs a lightweight agent on every host that reconciles that state continuously — including while the centre is unreachable.

This documentation is organised as:

• Getting Started — what Ballast needs to run, and this page.
• Installation — installing the centre and the agent.
• Your First Cluster — provisioning a host and joining it to a cluster.
• Core Concepts — desired-state contracts and quorum witnesses.
• Operations — DR runbooks and templates.
• Migration — moving workloads off VMware.
• Reference — troubleshooting and FAQ.

Who this is for

Ballast is aimed at anyone running Hyper-V standalone hosts or failover clusters who wants a single console for inventory, configuration and recovery, without the licensing model of a VMware-based stack.

Versioning

This documentation is not yet versioned per release — there is one copy, tracking main. Ballast is pre-1.0 and a 0.x release line is treated as a single ongoing line rather than a series of separately-pinned versions (see the licensing model's own grandfathering rule), so a per-release docs snapshot isn't worth the maintenance cost yet. That will change at the first 1.0 line.