Which type of environment am I even running, out of standalone and self-hosted?
In the oVirt context, self-hosted means the oVirt engine runs inside the hypervisor it manages itself. Standalone refers to scenarios where the oVirt engine runs outside, for example on a dedicated baremetal server or on a different hypervisor (which could be another technology altogether, such as VMWare).
In other words, if you open the oVirt GUI and you find the oVirt engine among the virtual machines, you have a self-hosted installation. Otherwise, it is standalone.
Is it possible to do this certificate renewal procedure just by shutting down/stopping VMs (regardless of them being pinned or not pinned), as well as potentially transferring some to the other server first
Sure. In fact, this is the first step in the procedure you linked:
In the Administration Portal, click Compute Hosts.
Click Management Maintenance and then click OK. The virtual machines should automatically migrate away from the host. If they are pinned or otherwise cannot be migrated, you must shut them down.
When the host is in maintenance mode and there are no more virtual machines remaining on this host, click Installation Enroll Certificate.
Just how risky to the oVirt environment is it likely to be? The guide says "The engine-setup script prompts you with configuration questions." Beyond the obvious one that I'm doing this for (the renew certificates question), how much else is it going to be asking and how possible is it to torch the installation if I get something wrong? How many of the certificate fields am I going to have to supply: just the O and CN values, or more?
I do not remember exactly what happens when you have to update a certificate, but the engine-setup answers based on your current configuration can be read with cat /var/lib/ovirt-engine/setup/answers/*.conf
, so you could check the content of that file (or even copy it on your laptop) and copy the answers.
A (possibly more readable) version of those files is given by:
cat /var/lib/ovirt-engine/setup/answers/*.conf | sed 's/str:/ /g' | sort -u
which returns something like:
[environment:default]
# OTOPI answer file, generated by human dialog
QUESTION/1/DWH_VACUUM_FULL= yes
QUESTION/1/ENGINE_VACUUM_FULL= yes
[...]
QUESTION/1/OVESETUP_DWH_ENABLE= yes