The VSM agent is a process that runs on all Ceph cluster nodes. The job of the VSM agent is to send server configuration, cluster health/status information, as well as performance data to the VSM controller. The VSM agent uses the server manifest file to identify the VSM controller node, authenticate against it, and determine server configuration.

The following diagram illustrates the interaction of different VSM components with each other as well as with the OpenStack infrastructure and VSM operators: