[ovirt-users] oVirt on a single server

[Barak Korren]

On 6 September 2016 at 00:34, Christophe TREFOIS
<christophe.trefois at uni.lu> wrote:
> So basically we need at least 2 nodes to enter the realm of testing and maintained?
>
> If we’re talking pure oVirt here.

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is more complex, but first a disclaimer, I'm am
going to describe the situation as I am aware of it, from my point of
view is a Red Hat employee and a member of the oVirt infra team. I'm
an probably not knowledgeable about everything that goes on, for
example there is a fairly large Chinese oVirt community that commits
various efforts of which I know very little.

When I'm taking testing and maintenance, I think we can agree that for
something to be maintained it needs to meet to following criteria:
1. It needs to be tested at least once for every oVirt release
2. Results of that testing need to make their way to the hands of developers.
   Malfunctions should end up as bugs tracked in Bugzilla.

Probably the largest group that does regular testing for oVirt is the
quality engineering group in Red Hat. Red Hat puts a great deal of
resources into oVirt, but those resources are not infinite. And when
the time comes to schedule resources, the needs of paying Red Hat
customers typically come first. Those customers are probably more
likely to be running large data centers.

Another set of regular testing is being done automatically by the
oVirt CI systems. Those tests [1] use Lago [2] to run testing suits
that simulate various situations for oVirt to run in. The smallest
configuration currently tested that way is a 2-node hosted engine
configuration. As all those tests have been written by Red Hat
employees, they tend to focus on what ends up going into RHEV.

It it important to note that not every oVirt feature ends up in RHEV,
but that does not mean that that feature never gets tested. There are
several oVirt features that are very useful for building oVirt-based
testing systems for oVirt itself and as a result get regular testing
as well. Notable examples are nested virtualization and the Glance
support.

The above being said, there is nothing preventing anyone in the
community from creating a test suit for single-host use that will get
run regularly by the oVirt CI system. That kind of effort will require
some degree of commitment to make it work, fix it when it inevitably
breaks, and report what it finds to the developers. There are already
existing tools in the oVirt repos that make building such a test suit
quite straight forward. I will be happy to guid anyone interested in
taking such an effort.

[1]: http://lago.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[2]: https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/admin/projects/ovirt-system-tests

-- 
Barak Korren
bkorren at redhat.com
RHEV-CI Team