Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Eduardo Mayoral]

My 0.02€

Cost aside (which is actually not the main reason for the organization I
work for):

  * Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket / vendor. This holds true
for any particula area. (Virtualization, storage, network equipment,
server HW). This gives you leverage when negotiating purchases /
renewals / maintenance contract.
  * The community support for oVirt ABSOLUTELY ROCKS
  * If you are planning to do something with openstack in the short or
mid term, I think oVirt is a nice path to go.
  o Integration with Glance / Cinder / Neutron is cool.
  o The hypervisor is the same (KVM).
  o I have successfully moved VM images to/from openstack and they
worked seamlessly.
  o At the same time, the architecture is quite similar to VCenter,
and import of VMs from VMWare works pretty well .
  * As the compute nodes (hosts) are mostly plain CentOS 7 it is much
easier to integrate them with whatever you have in place for
monitoring, configuration management, backup...
  * The user portal with user quotas can work nicely as self-service for
users, depending on your needs.
  * Version update procedures way less painful with oVirt than with VMWare.
  * On the downside, I think that functionality-wise, VMWare still has
an edge, but oVirt is good-enough for a lot of use cases.

Eduardo Mayoral Jimeno (emayo...@arsys.es)
Administrador de sistemas. Departamento de Plataformas. Arsys internet.
+34 941 620 145 ext. 5153

On 07/09/17 13:33, david caughey wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
> looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will
> be a sell point.
> If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:
>
> Who are the big users of oVirt??
>
> Why oVirt and not vMware??
> (we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)
>
> What is the future for oVirt??
>
> Why do you use oVirt??
>
> Any links or ideas appreciated,
>
> BR/David
>
>
> ___
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> Users@ovirt.org
> http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users

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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Yedidyah Bar David]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 8:01 PM, Christopher Cox  wrote:
> On 09/07/2017 06:33 AM, david caughey wrote:
>>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
>> looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will be a
>> sell point.
>
>
> Could be hard to sell.  It's not like VMware (all in all) is deficient
> functionality wise.
>
>> If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:
>>
>> Who are the big users of oVirt??
>
>
> We use oVirt in production.  We have about 130 VMs on a 9 node cluster using
> Dell blades.  It houses both our test and production VMs.  We have a
> separate oVirt setup for development hosting probably about 20 VMs (maybe
> less), it's an 7 node cluster (but much lesser blades there).
>
> In both cases they are connected to Equalogic iSCSI SAN equipment with
> multiple tiers of storage.  Each production blade has 4 x 10gbit iSCSI
> (multi)paths to storage.  The production blade subsystem uses multiple
> 40Gbit links, for iSCSI storage and for LAN. Just 10Gbit links and 1Gbit
> paths on the development blades and subsystem.
>
> Both use a dedicated oVirt management host.
>
> The production(and test) blades run oVirt 3.6 and the dev blades are oVirt
> 3.5.
>
> About 2 years ago we migrated our production blades from oVirt 3.4 on older
> blades and older SAN equipment to oVirt 3.6 on new blades and new SAN
> storage.  We used oVirt's export domain to facilitate the move.
>
> We will be migrating off the development cluster and we are setting up a new
> cluster on the same DC as our production area which will be used to house
> both test and development.  Thus we are moving to just the one oVirt 3.6
> (we're adding 5 extra blades for that cluster).
>
> Btw, our VMs include multiple version of CentOS, Windows Server and Windows
> desktops (and even some docker nodes, but we're redoing all of that).  Our
> VMs include about 10 large PostgreSQL database servers, some MySQL, several
> Jboss servers, many web microservices (Springboot) servers and lost of
> application infrastructure servers.
>
>>
>> Why oVirt and not vMware??
>> (we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)
>
>
> Uh free, and to be honest, that's the best reason to do this IMHO.
>
>>
>> What is the future for oVirt??
>
>
> Unknown.  But pretty sure Red Hat will want to keep RHEV around, which means
> oVirt probably will be here for quite some time.
>
>>
>> Why do you use oVirt??
>
>
> Free.
>
>>
>> Any links or ideas appreciated,
>
>
> oVirt is NOT VMware.  But if you do things "well" oVirt works quite well.
> Follow the list to see folks that didn't necessarily do things "well" (sad,
> but true).
>
> I inherited this oVirt... not ideal for blades because it's better to have
> lots of networks.  We just have two blade fabrics, one for SAN and one for
> the rest, and it would be nice to have ovirtmgmt and migration networks be
> isolated.  With that said, with our massively VLAN'd setup, it does work and
> has been very reliable.  For performance reasons, I recommend that you
> attempt to dedicate a host for SPM, or at least keep the number of VMs
> deployed there to a minimum.  There are tweaks in the setup to keep VMs off
> the SPM node (talking mainly if you have a massively combined network like I
> have currently).

Do you routinely have many storage operations going on (create/remove vm,
create/remove disk, take/remove a snapshot etc.)?

If not, do you still recommend a dedicated SPM host?

If yes, why?

See also:

https://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/storage/decommission-master-domain-and-spm/

It was panned to happen in 4.0, didn't happen yet. No idea about concrete
future plans.

>
> We've survived many bad events with regards to SAN and power, which is a
> tribute to oVirt's reliability.  However, you can shoot yourself in the foot
> very easily with oVirt... so just be careful.
>
> Is VMware better?  Yes.  Is it more flexible than oVirt?  Yes. Is it more
> reliable than oVirt? Yes.  In other words, if money is of no concern, VMware
> and VCenter.
>
> We will likely never do VMware here due to cost (noting, that the cost is in
> VCenter, and IMHO, it's not horrible, but I do not control the wallet here,
> and we tend to prefer FOSS here... and FOSS is my personal preference as
> well).
>
> Companies generally speaking just want something that works.  And oVirt does
> work.  But if money is of no concern and you need the friendliness of
> something VCenter like (noting that not everyone needs VCenter or RHEV-M or
> oVirt Manager), then VMware is still better.
>
> If you don't need something VCenter like, I can also so say that libvirt
> (KVM) and virt-manager is also reasonable, and we use that as well.  But we
> also have a (free) ESXi (because we have to, forced requirement).
>
> The ovirtmgmt web ui is gross IMHO.  It's a perfect example of an overweight
> UI where a simplified UI 

Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Christopher Cox]

On 09/07/2017 04:06 PM, Dan Yasny wrote:



On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Christopher Cox > wrote:



Not to defend VMware too much, but if you buy certified HW for
VMware, I've never had the purple screen of death.  With that said,
I have had the purple screen of death using non-certified VMware HW.


I've worked for a certified hardware vendor, you will not believe the 
amount of calls we received for PSODs every day :)


Hmmm... I guess I was fortunate.
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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Dan Yasny]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Christopher Cox  wrote:

>
> Not to defend VMware too much, but if you buy certified HW for VMware,
> I've never had the purple screen of death.  With that said, I have had the
> purple screen of death using non-certified VMware HW.
>
>
I've worked for a certified hardware vendor, you will not believe the
amount of calls we received for PSODs every day :)


> Just saying... and again, it does mean that you need to usually spend more
> for an effective VMware setup.
>
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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Christopher Cox]

On 09/07/2017 03:49 PM, Michael Kleinpaste wrote:
...snippity di do da...
really, so purchasing VMware just doesn't make sense.  We've also found 
VMware to not be as stable as oVirt.   Our initial oVirt system has been 
running for about 3-4 years (I'd have to look at the ticket to get the 
exact date) without so much as a reboot.  Our VMware systems kept 
getting kernel errors about every 2 months further prompting us to look 
elsewhere.


Not to defend VMware too much, but if you buy certified HW for VMware, 
I've never had the purple screen of death.  With that said, I have had 
the purple screen of death using non-certified VMware HW.


Just saying... and again, it does mean that you need to usually spend 
more for an effective VMware setup.


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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Michael Kleinpaste]

Who are the big users of oVirt?
By big do you mean size of company or deployment size.

Company-wsie, besides Red Hat?
https://www.ovirt.org/community/user-stories/user-stories/

We used to do VMware but dumped it mainly because we got sick of the price
tag associated with it.  Innovation comes from employees not platforms.  We
use oVirt now in our corporate office for internal, dev and some production
systems.  We're in a hyper-converged hosted engine setup on CentOS 7 with
storage (GlusterFS) running in replica 3 across 3 nodes on 10GBase-T
switches.

Why oVirt and not vMware?
Free is a big factor and should be considered in decision making process.
The cost savings over 5 years by eliminating VMware licensing alone is
huge.  And the technical knowledge to manage oVirt in place of VMware is
easily obtained.  You can even try it FOR FREE!

Regardless of the cost however, oVirt is ENTERPRISE VIRTUALIZATION.  It is
the upstream project for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.  In fact the
docs for RHEV can be used to administrate oVirt (for the most part).

You get:
True web based management console (not that crappy Flash interface)
End User Portal
Active Directory integration
Memory Ballooning
Live Migration
Live Storage Migration
High Availability settings
QoS
Host Load Balancing
IPMI power management
VLAN tagging
External or Hyper-converged storage options.
VM resource allocation
Storage Geo Replication (onsite or across the internet to another site).

and one of my favorites...  Import VMs straight from VMware to oVirt.

What is the future for oVirt?
RHEV isn't going anywhere. And for there to be RHEV you need oVirt.
They've got some big names using them including British Airways.

https://goo.gl/9jQcsZ
https://goo.gl/mJFzPw

Why do you use oVirt?
Again, it really boils down to licensing costs.  VMware is not just an
upfront cost.  If you want to get updates you have to maintain your support
license.  oVirt does everything we need it to do, and more really, so
purchasing VMware just doesn't make sense.  We've also found VMware to not
be as stable as oVirt.   Our initial oVirt system has been running for
about 3-4 years (I'd have to look at the ticket to get the exact date)
without so much as a reboot.  Our VMware systems kept getting kernel errors
about every 2 months further prompting us to look elsewhere.


-- 
*Michael Kleinpaste*
Senior Systems Administrator
SharperLending, LLC.
www.SharperLending.com
michael.kleinpa...@sharperlending.com
(509) 324-1230   Fax: (509) 324-1234
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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Johan Bernhardsson]

On September 7, 2017 19:01:58 Christopher Cox  wrote:







Any links or ideas appreciated,


oVirt is NOT VMware.  But if you do things "well" oVirt works quite
well.  Follow the list to see folks that didn't necessarily do things
"well" (sad, but true).

I inherited this oVirt... not ideal for blades because it's better to
have lots of networks.  We just have two blade fabrics, one for SAN and
one for the rest, and it would be nice to have ovirtmgmt and migration
networks be isolated.  With that said, with our massively VLAN'd setup,
it does work and has been very reliable.  For performance reasons, I
recommend that you attempt to dedicate a host for SPM, or at least keep
the number of VMs deployed there to a minimum.  There are tweaks in the
setup to keep VMs off the SPM node (talking mainly if you have a
massively combined network like I have currently).

We've survived many bad events with regards to SAN and power, which is a
tribute to oVirt's reliability.  However, you can shoot yourself in the
foot very easily with oVirt... so just be careful.

Is VMware better?  Yes.  Is it more flexible than oVirt?  Yes. Is it
more reliable than oVirt? Yes.  In other words, if money is of no
concern, VMware and VCenter.

We will likely never do VMware here due to cost (noting, that the cost
is in VCenter, and IMHO, it's not horrible, but I do not control the
wallet here, and we tend to prefer FOSS here... and FOSS is my personal
preference as well).

Companies generally speaking just want something that works.  And oVirt
does work.  But if money is of no concern and you need the friendliness
of something VCenter like (noting that not everyone needs VCenter or
RHEV-M or oVirt Manager), then VMware is still better.

If you don't need something VCenter like, I can also so say that libvirt
(KVM) and virt-manager is also reasonable, and we use that as well.  But
we also have a (free) ESXi (because we have to, forced requirement).

The ovirtmgmt web ui is gross IMHO.  It's a perfect example of an
overweight UI where a simplified UI would have been cleaner, faster and
better.  Just because you know how to write thousands of lines of
javascript doesn't mean you should.  Not everything needs to act like a
trading floor application or facebook.  The art of efficient UI design
has been lost.  With that said, the RESTful i/f part is nice.  Nice to
the point of not needing the SDK.

Finally, VMware can be expensive.  It's not a "one time" purchase.  It's
HAS TO BE ongoing.  And it can get very expensive if not understood.
With that said, if you have anything Microsoft in the enterprise, you
already understand and are prepared to throw cash for IT infrastructure.
  If you do go VMware, make sure to use a hefty Vcenter host as upgrades
to VCenter involve a lot of bloat and waste.

VMware can be a real "pain" support wise.  They can deprecate your
entire hypervisor HW stack, especially true in a major release.  They
can even deprecate HW in a minor release (I have fallen victim to this).

Thus, again, if you have money to burn and have relatively short HW life
cycles (less than 5 years for sure), AND that includes OS life cycles as
well, then VMware is probably ok.  Not saying there aren't some problems
on the oVirt side as well, just saying VMware has more expensive warts.
And thus "paid support" becomes somewhat humorous (but in a sad sort of
way).

(oVirt community support ROCKS!  Just saying...)


From my work with both VMware and ovirt. I must say that the ovirt 4.1 
installations I have is more reliable that the vsphere/vcenter 
installations I maintain.


But the key is to do it well. That applies to any virtualization solution. 
If you plan wrong and just throw it in you will have problems.


I use ovirt 4.1.* and gluster as a Backend. And the many things I thought 
about in loads of ways has made it rock solid. As a separate vlan for 
storage and migration and one for ovirtmanagement.


And yes this is an awesome community :)

/Johan


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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Christopher Cox]

On 09/07/2017 06:33 AM, david caughey wrote:

Hi Folks,

I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am 
looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will 
be a sell point.


Could be hard to sell.  It's not like VMware (all in all) is deficient 
functionality wise.



If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:

Who are the big users of oVirt??


We use oVirt in production.  We have about 130 VMs on a 9 node cluster 
using Dell blades.  It houses both our test and production VMs.  We have 
a separate oVirt setup for development hosting probably about 20 VMs 
(maybe less), it's an 7 node cluster (but much lesser blades there).


In both cases they are connected to Equalogic iSCSI SAN equipment with 
multiple tiers of storage.  Each production blade has 4 x 10gbit iSCSI 
(multi)paths to storage.  The production blade subsystem uses multiple 
40Gbit links, for iSCSI storage and for LAN. Just 10Gbit links and 1Gbit 
paths on the development blades and subsystem.


Both use a dedicated oVirt management host.

The production(and test) blades run oVirt 3.6 and the dev blades are 
oVirt 3.5.


About 2 years ago we migrated our production blades from oVirt 3.4 on 
older blades and older SAN equipment to oVirt 3.6 on new blades and new 
SAN storage.  We used oVirt's export domain to facilitate the move.


We will be migrating off the development cluster and we are setting up a 
new cluster on the same DC as our production area which will be used to 
house both test and development.  Thus we are moving to just the one 
oVirt 3.6 (we're adding 5 extra blades for that cluster).


Btw, our VMs include multiple version of CentOS, Windows Server and 
Windows desktops (and even some docker nodes, but we're redoing all of 
that).  Our VMs include about 10 large PostgreSQL database servers, some 
MySQL, several Jboss servers, many web microservices (Springboot) 
servers and lost of application infrastructure servers.




Why oVirt and not vMware??
(we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)


Uh free, and to be honest, that's the best reason to do this IMHO.



What is the future for oVirt??


Unknown.  But pretty sure Red Hat will want to keep RHEV around, which 
means oVirt probably will be here for quite some time.




Why do you use oVirt??


Free.



Any links or ideas appreciated,


oVirt is NOT VMware.  But if you do things "well" oVirt works quite 
well.  Follow the list to see folks that didn't necessarily do things 
"well" (sad, but true).


I inherited this oVirt... not ideal for blades because it's better to 
have lots of networks.  We just have two blade fabrics, one for SAN and 
one for the rest, and it would be nice to have ovirtmgmt and migration 
networks be isolated.  With that said, with our massively VLAN'd setup, 
it does work and has been very reliable.  For performance reasons, I 
recommend that you attempt to dedicate a host for SPM, or at least keep 
the number of VMs deployed there to a minimum.  There are tweaks in the 
setup to keep VMs off the SPM node (talking mainly if you have a 
massively combined network like I have currently).


We've survived many bad events with regards to SAN and power, which is a 
tribute to oVirt's reliability.  However, you can shoot yourself in the 
foot very easily with oVirt... so just be careful.


Is VMware better?  Yes.  Is it more flexible than oVirt?  Yes. Is it 
more reliable than oVirt? Yes.  In other words, if money is of no 
concern, VMware and VCenter.


We will likely never do VMware here due to cost (noting, that the cost 
is in VCenter, and IMHO, it's not horrible, but I do not control the 
wallet here, and we tend to prefer FOSS here... and FOSS is my personal 
preference as well).


Companies generally speaking just want something that works.  And oVirt 
does work.  But if money is of no concern and you need the friendliness 
of something VCenter like (noting that not everyone needs VCenter or 
RHEV-M or oVirt Manager), then VMware is still better.


If you don't need something VCenter like, I can also so say that libvirt 
(KVM) and virt-manager is also reasonable, and we use that as well.  But 
we also have a (free) ESXi (because we have to, forced requirement).


The ovirtmgmt web ui is gross IMHO.  It's a perfect example of an 
overweight UI where a simplified UI would have been cleaner, faster and 
better.  Just because you know how to write thousands of lines of 
javascript doesn't mean you should.  Not everything needs to act like a 
trading floor application or facebook.  The art of efficient UI design 
has been lost.  With that said, the RESTful i/f part is nice.  Nice to 
the point of not needing the SDK.


Finally, VMware can be expensive.  It's not a "one time" purchase.  It's 
HAS TO BE ongoing.  And it can get very expensive if not understood. 
With that said, if you have anything Microsoft in the enterprise, you 
already understand and are prepared to 

Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Yedidyah Bar David]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 2:54 PM, Yaniv Kaul  wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 2:33 PM, david caughey  wrote:
>>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
>> looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will be a
>> sell point.
>
>
> Good luck!
>
>>
>> If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:
>>
>> Who are the big users of oVirt??
>
>
> There are many. We don't have a lot of user cases on ovirt.org, but there
> are many universities, for example.

You can also have a look at:

http://lists.ovirt.org/pipermail/users/2017-April/081221.html

>
>>
>>
>> Why oVirt and not vMware??
>> (we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)
>
>
> Is VMware free? Or open? Can you fix bugs or add features to it?
> I'm (VERY) biased, but I think ease of use, performance (especially of Linux
> VMs) and breadth of integration are the main key points.
>>
>>
>> What is the future for oVirt??
>
>
> 4.2 Alpha is just around the corner, with new UI and plenty features. Any
> area specifically?

You can also get a hint about what *might* be done in future versions
by searching bugzilla.

Best,

>
>
>>
>>
>> Why do you use oVirt??
>
>
> I know some use it for server virtualization, some for desktop
> virtualization. I think more for the former than the latter.
> An IAAS for containers based solutions (such as Kubernetes, OpenShift) is
> also a strong initiative recently.
> It is definitely used for used at any scale - from a home lab, 3 nodes
> hyper-converged to enterprise, with hundreds of hosts for mission critical,
> highly available services.
>
>>
>>
>> Any links or ideas appreciated,
>
>
> I think such presentation would be more successful if it hit the needs of
> the recipients. What are their current pain points? Where would they like to
> be tomorrow?
> Y.
>
>>
>>
>> BR/David
>>
>> ___
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>> Users@ovirt.org
>> http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>>
>
>
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>



-- 
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Re: [ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Yaniv Kaul]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 2:33 PM, david caughey  wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
> looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will be a
> sell point.
>

Good luck!


> If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:
>
> Who are the big users of oVirt??
>

There are many. We don't have a lot of user cases on ovirt.org, but there
are many universities, for example.


>
> Why oVirt and not vMware??
> (we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)
>

Is VMware free? Or open? Can you fix bugs or add features to it?
I'm (VERY) biased, but I think ease of use, performance (especially of
Linux VMs) and breadth of integration are the main key points.

>
> What is the future for oVirt??
>

4.2 Alpha is just around the corner, with new UI and plenty features. Any
area specifically?



>
> Why do you use oVirt??
>

I know some use it for server virtualization, some for desktop
virtualization. I think more for the former than the latter.
An IAAS for containers based solutions (such as Kubernetes, OpenShift) is
also a strong initiative recently.
It is definitely used for used at any scale - from a home lab, 3 nodes
hyper-converged to enterprise, with hundreds of hosts for mission critical,
highly available services.


>
> Any links or ideas appreciated,
>

I think such presentation would be more successful if it hit the needs of
the recipients. What are their current pain points? Where would they like
to be tomorrow?
Y.


>
> BR/David
>
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>
>
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[ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[david caughey]

Hi Folks,

I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will be a
sell point.
If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:

Who are the big users of oVirt??

Why oVirt and not vMware??
(we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)

What is the future for oVirt??

Why do you use oVirt??

Any links or ideas appreciated,

BR/David
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