What is Reddit's opinion of
oVirt?
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28 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I have an oVirt test lab here that works quite nicely. I would recommend you use CentOS 6.5 as your base OS it's what I had the least pain with. One thing that I think you'll like is that it comes with a 'User Portal' so you can delegate control of the VM(s) to end users (in my case developers, but it could easily be customers).
- KVM is built into the kernel since 2.6.20.
- Libvirt is an API to KVM. Lot of applications use libvirt to control virtual machines.
- If you install oVirt by yum, it'll pull in all the necessary dependencies.
The whole thing is as simple as installing CentOS7 (or 6 if you really want) and following this quickstart guide
Personally, I would start off learning the fundamentals using something like virsh or virt-manager as oVirt is quite overwhelming to a total beginner.
Luckily, KVM's flexibility (through libvirt) gives you lots of options here.
Though it probably wouldn't fit your use case, I used Foreman in the past, though it's much more geared towards en masse provisioning in a heavily config-managed environment (such as puppet.) However, it's worked well for me if it looks like something you're interested in.
Though I haven't tried it, oVirt sounds like it may be a good fit for you. It's a Red Hat project, so it's got good backing.
Openstack is sort of what you're talking about, but it's much more geared towards doing this sort of thing at a much bigger scale.
With all that being said, if you're flexible, you could always use something more simple like virt-manager if you don't mind losing the web UI. As long as your laptop/client machine can open an X-forwarded tunnel and can run X applications on an X server (which should be anything) it'll be a more simple design.
> works great, but competing technologies have features that automate this migration process based on the load of an individual node in the cluster (vmotion).
You get that if you use oVirt (open source, basis for Red Hat's RHEV). KVM and QEMU are just the plumbing.
See here: http://www.ovirt.org/OVirt_Administration_Guide#.E2.81.A0Migrating_Virtual_Machines_Between_Hosts
Ganeti is a management tool that sits on top of KVM or Xen.. It isn't really comparable to ESXi - ESXi is full stack visualization. It has the hypervisor, kernel and management tools which is an end-to-end solution (some of the time) for managing a VM pool.
Xen and KVM are not full stack (I use the term full stack very loosely here). Whilst they do provide the hypervisor and kernel, they often do not provide management tools - or if they do, they are CLI based and difficult to use/inadequate for large deployment scenarios. People often put stuff on top of Xen and KVM to make management of VMs easier. Ganeti is one of these solutions it would seem - much like oVirt. It's an "addon" for Xen or KVM, which makes management of those hypervisors easier. ESXi does it all in one - so you would not be able to use Ganeti or oVirt with ESXi, as the ESXi web or C# console would manage everything for you.
Your company probably uses Xen or KVM under the hood and Ganeti to manage everything. It may be that Ganeti is more scriptable, flexible or suited to your companies purposes - rather than ESXi which is very proprietary and rudimentary in how it does stuff. Other than the management decision for using Ganeti, the hypervisor question would then be "Why Xen/KVM over ESXi?" and that is an argument I would rather not get into! :)
> I think this is built on top of oVirt
Almost, ovirt was seeded with the RHEV source code.
> Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any packages for it, so you have to build it > from source.
Actually nightly builds just started for Fedora16 :
I was using Libvirt/KVM on RHEL6 for my hypervisor, VM images on SSD disk. Two or more simultaneous transcodes things got to be a little shaky (high load average, CPU-bound, etc). Occasionally it would just randomly lag out usually after media scans so I had a cronjob to restart plex after every media scan (once a day) which helped that but I wanted to support 2+ streams and it wasn't cutting it. I did a bunch of tuning but it didn't seem to help (open files, limits, etc). A contributing factor could be that I run three other unrelated VMs' on that machine and they were fighting for contention.
Either way the Hypervisor CPU was a Q3-2012 i-7 mobile (in a fanless itx setup) so it was probably showing its age.
I wish I had tried clonezilla before, usually I'd just use a combination of dd, pipes, ssh to clone disk images, seems pretty straightforward to go back to a VM if I ever wanted to.
Unrelated to me I've got another friend with a much more powerful set of oVirt Hypervisors and he had the same issues after he got 2 or more simultaneous transcodes, he moved to bare metal first and I doggedly kept at it until I was trying unsuccessfully to watch Curb your Enthusiasm between flights, that was the tipping point.
I have worked with RHEV 3.6. So far it has been a great product. It is really reliable and stable. I wouldn't say it is as good as ESXi yet, but it is certainly getting there. Ovirt 4.0 (RHEV's upstream) roadmap looks really exciting. There is a lot of usability and ease of use innovation coming down the pipe.
For what you're doing, I'd probably recommend Vagrant. It's lightweight (the vagrant utility and a git repo to track your work), utilizes your existing hypervisor, and has very good support for doing configuration post-init (to avoid the need of baking images).
You want the libvirt driver (https://github.com/pradels/vagrant-libvirt/blob/master/README.md ) which you probably knew, but maybe you missed its link near the bottom with instructions on building boxes, at https://github.com/pradels/vagrant-libvirt/tree/master/example_box
It should be as simple as tarring up the .img file from your modified box.
That said, if you want to listen to the haters and go with something else (which there are positives and negatives to), you might check out the ovirt project at http://www.ovirt.org/Home . It's the upstream of the RHEV product that (sorta) competes with ESXi. It'll provide you a web interface for spinning up/down/snapshotting/consoleing into VMs of all types - both Linux, Windows, and everything in between. It uses libvirt under the hood.
I have been using Virt-Manager for a few years, I just live it. However if you really want to take this to next level, You might want to look at RHEL/FEDORA/CENTOS for another great Web based tool which blows virt-manager out of the water. It is called O-Virt. OVIRT I will submitt this as a separate post. I was just waiting for LAS to start something related to KVM. Thanks for the great show this week, and Welcome Noah !!
oVirt if you want free - http://www.ovirt.org/Home
RHEV if you have the money - http://www.redhat.com/products/cloud-computing/virtualization/
ISCSI, FC, NFS, live migrations, snapshots, you can even run Gluster for fun.
Hi GiZiM,
While this reddit is great for anouncements, blog posts and the like, for questions you're much better off with the oVirt users mailing list.
You can sign up to it here:
http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Then send your question to:
You can also join the #ovirt channel on the OFTC IRC server and ask there. All of the oVirt developers are on the IRC channel (Most working in the European time zones), and are monitoring the mailing list daily.
Check out the oVirt community page:
oVIrt provides centralized management of multiple hypervisor instances and provides "Enterprise" capabilities such as High Availability, advanced resource scheduling, and centralizes enterprise storage, networking and authentication. If you're literally looking to simply run a hypervisor on a single host, KVM with Virt Manager may be the simplest path forward.
Within its architecture, oVirt communicates to a Host Agent (VDSM) on each hypervisor. The VDSM, in turn, leverages the underlying KVM/libvirt capabilities of the hypervisor host. oVirt sends commands to these individual VDSM agents on each hypervisor to provide the centralized management capabilities. It's an additional layer that is unnecessary if you aren't running a multi-host setup.
oVirt Quick Start Guide is the first place to start to get up and running. This will define the terminology used in oVirt and would enable you to compare that to the ESXi/vCenter terminology. The concept of Storage Domains is a slightly different approach than VMware storage, which is where most are likely to get tripped up on first setup.
RHEV Docs go quite a bit deeper than the oVirt documentation, but is very specific to running RHEV on RHEL vs other Linux Distributions.
The IRC channel is #ovirt on irc.oftc.net (I'm sherold there)
CentOS 6 + oVirt pretty much matches your requirements http://www.ovirt.org/Home
I'm not sure if it's quite lightweight enough for you, as its web interface and vdsm layers are running Java.
If you can nix the web interface requirement, a better solution given your resources (caveat, you should just go buy more ram) would be lightweight containers via something like Docker. It doesn't support Windows guests of course, but it's about the lightest weight you'll get for service separation in Linux.
oVirt and RHEV plus the Administration guide
To answer your post subject, YES pfsense will do everything you are wanting... and soooo much more. It's really an incredible distro that just keeps getting better!
In reference to the virtualization stuff... Another option that is dead-easy to setup, and administer all from web gui, is Proxmox VE. I know there's a little hate toward Proxmox lately because they're not always the friendliest, and they tend to respond with "buy a support subscription"... However their installer is easy, and the web gui is one of the better that gives you 99% ability to control everything so you can get up and going and then learn Linux underneath as you go.
But they aren't the only ones these days. There's oVirt and Mist.IO, which have some nice GUIs as well.
That's my $.02
oVirt is a decent free option. Linux KVM based, nice centralized Web management interface (that can run on the cluster itself as a VM if you don't want to dedicate hardware to it). We upgraded an outdated vSphere 4 cluster to it, and have been really liking it. It's the upstream project backing Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization product. Using the Linux command line is really only needed during setup, after that it's all web management.
I've actually never installed proxmox, oVirt was the first thing I've ever set up beyond simple virt-manager. They have some really great documentation on how to get set up. The only place I hit any snags was on the disks, but that was just me not reading things.
I will have to give this a try. I only have room for 1 fibre card in my FreeNAS rig so I will have to start off as iSCSI via ethernet.
Did you follow the hosted engine how to located here?
I actually haven't played with spice/qxl with libvirt yet (I went to play with it once without installing anything in the guest and got a black screen... good times) but it appears you need both video drivers and some vdagent installed
From: http://www.ovirt.org/OVirt_3.5.2_Release_Notes
[ INFO ] Restarting nfs services [ ERROR ] Failed to execute stage 'Closing up': Command '/bin/systemctl' failed to execute
Retrying (engine-cleanup, engine-setup again) it's enough to avoid it cause the kernel module it's always ready on further attempts. Manually starting NFS service (/bin/systemctl restart nfs-server.service) before running engine setup it's enough to avoid it at all.
NFS startup on EL7.1 requires manual startup of rpcbind.service BZ 1171603 before running engine setup in order to avoid
[ INFO ] Restarting nfs services [ ERROR ] Failed to execute stage 'Closing up': Command '/bin/systemctl' failed to execute
Engine and host upgrade ordering due to bug BZ 1196327. When upgrading your deployment to 3.5.2 please your upgrade engine first and next your hosts. When following order is not preserved you will see following error every 3 seconds.
have you see this yet? http://www.ovirt.org/Features/ForemanIntegration
also, if you google: foreman ovirt, you'll find some stuff along with some videos that may help.
I have only played with Foreman for a bit. Eventually I felt that SaltStack worked better for my needs.
I've not tried Proxmox but if you looking for something built on kvm theres oVirt which is RedHat's answer. The management component can suck up quite a bit of ram IIRC, not anymore then vsphere anyway.
Personally I use oVirt. It is the upstream for RHEV, so esentially competes with vSphere.
It used to require a seperate host to manage the cluster, but it is self-hosted now.
http://www.ovirt.org/Download#Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_6.2FCentOS_Installation_Instructions
Ovirt and RHEV both use LVM under the hood. Though it's frustrating that a quick Google search doesn't turn up how. I guess these are the closest:
http://www.ovirt.org/Vdsm_Block_Storage_Domains http://www.ovirt.org/Architecture
It's still in its infancy but oVirt looks like it'll be a good solution. You can download the source and build it yourself though I ran into problems the last time I tried.
Keep an eye on it. Could be something good.