Hi everyone!

It's been a while since something was announced. But in the background, a lot of work has been done!
Since RedHat fully stepped down from the oVirt development, my team did an awesome job to take the development into our hands and continue building a strong product.

A lot of steps were taken to just make everything working again. From CI pipelines to build processes to fixing deprecated components etc.

Next to that, we dropped all support for CentOS 8, as this OS is EOL.

CentOS Stream 10 / EL 10

But next to just the house keeping, we also did a lot of effort to make the project fully building on CentOS Stream 10 (and also on EL 10).
The ovirt-engine (and all other java codebases) now build on OpenJDK 21 instead of OpenJDK 11.
This because OpenJDK 21 is available on both CentOS 9 as CentOS 10. This way the code can be built on the same version for both OS'es.
Still the code is built with release target 11, so you can run it on OpenJDK 11+.

Next to the Java code, all the python code was reviewed and python-six/python-nose was removed and replaced with native Python 3 code and PyTest.
This to make the code more future proof.

Also all the needed dependencies were added to the oVirt VIRT SIG to have all oVirt dependencies available on CentOS 10.

Testing

As everything builds on CentOS 9 and CentOS 10 now, everyone that wants can easily test the current master version of oVirt.
You can find the fresh builds on COPR: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ovirt/ovirt-master-snapshot/
Please note that you need EPEL enabled on CentOS/RHEL 10 builds. As we don't build all our dependencies ourselves when they are available in EPEL.

The CentOS 9 builds should work smoothly.
The CentOS 10 builds should work ... :) But bugs are expected.

Therefor it's very helpful if you spend some time testing the new builds, and if you hit any issue, please report it with the needed logs/errors/reproducing steps.
This will help us resolving those issues!

Deprecated?

Some things are most likely going to be deprecated or are already removed in CentOS 10 builds:

Cinderlib

Cinderlib is not maintained anymore, and not available anymore on CentOS 10.
Therefor we decided to drop the support for cinderlib in CentOS 10.
You will still be able to use it on CentOS 9.
We are looking for some alternative, more updates on this when available :)

GlusterFS

As we all know, GlusterFS is also (quite) in maintenance mode.
Packages for GlusterFS are not available on CentOS 10 anymore. So GlusterFS support is dropped on CentOS 10!

CollectD

CollectD was used in oVirt to gather metrics of the hosts etc.
As this is neither available on CentOS 10, this has also been removed as a requirement on CentOS 10.

ovirt-node-ng

The oVirt node ISO images are currently only partially tested and build not very frequently.
This because the technology used to build those images might need a refresh.
But next to that, we feel like the advantages of having an oVirt node ISO is fairly small. And it even has some major disadvantages, like the fact you need to wait for a new ISO to receive a security update.
Therefor we are thinking of just deprecating ovirt-node-ng ISO's.
You can just install a fresh RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky/... and install the ovirt packages on it.

Chat

Some months ago we also introduced a new way of communication, Matrix!
You can find us and other users on https://matrix.to/#/#ovirt:ovirt.tech
Feel free to join, and have a discussion or help each other out with issues!

Next?

Currently we try to focus on some testing of the current builds and fix the issues that arise.
Once we feel comfortable, we will create a new release for testing.
Without any major issue, that will be our next oVirt 4.5 release.

Help

There are still a lot of things that need love, can get improved, etc.
if you want to help, feel free to reach out. Or just send in some PR's :)
There are easy things (like the website itself https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-site) that can use some attention.

Or you can help adding translations via our new Weblate setup on https://translate.ovirt.tech/.

THANKS!

Next to that I also want to thank Sandro from RedHat to assist us with questions or with reaching the right people!
And of course all the other people that send in PR's, helped us in the background, upgraded the mailinglist, etc :)

If there are questions, comments, whatever. Feel free to join us on Matrix, and open the discussion.

Let's have a great future ahead!

Jean-Louis