Introduction

:::note Placeholder page 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 versioned alongside Ballast releases. Use the version selector in the top navigation bar to read the docs for the release you are running. The version currently shown is unreleased and will move once a first tagged build exists.