Nova - compute service

Inspired by Amazon EC2, Nova is the compute service and the core of the OpenStack cloud. It is designed to manage and automate pools of compute resources, and can work with widely available virtualization technologies as well as bare metal servers.

It's important to note that Nova is not a hypervisor. It's a system of services that sit above the hypervisor, orchestrating availability of compute resources. Some examples of hypervisors include Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Xen, and the most popular, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). Nova also supports the ability to utilize Linux container technology such as LXC and Docker.

In OpenStack, the term booting is used to refer to the creation of a virtual machine. A virtual machine booted with Nova is often called an instance.