[ovirt-devel] Re: Testing image transfer and backup with OST environment

> IMO OST should be made easy to interact with from your main development > machine. TBH I didn't see much interest in running OST on developers' machines.

People are mostly using manual OST runs to verify things and that is what most of the efforts focus on. It's not that I wouldn't like OST to be more developer-friendly, I definitely would, but we need more manpower and interest for that to happen.

>> I noticed that many of you run OST in a VM ending up with three layers >> of VMs. >> I know it works, but I got multiple reports of assertions' timeouts and >> TBH I just don't >> see this as a viable solution to work with OST - you need a bare metal >> for that. > > Why? > > After all, we also work on a virtualization product/project. If it's > not good enough for ourselves, how do we expect others to use it? :-) I'm really cool with the engine and the hosts being VMs, but deploying engine and the hosts as VMs nested in other VM is what I think is unreasonable.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't think our customers run whole oVirt clusters inside VMs. There's just too much overhead with all that layers of nesting and the performance sucks. > Also, using bare-metal isn't always that easy/comfortable either, even > if you have the hardware. I'm very happy with my servers. What makes working with bm hard/uncomfortable?

I can think of reprovisioning, but that is not needed for OST usage. > CI also uses VMs for this, IIUC. Or did we move there to containers? > Perhaps we should invest in making this work well inside a container. CI doesn't use VMs - it uses a mix of containers and bare metals. The solution for containers can't handle el8 and that's why we're stuck with running OST on el7 mostly (apart from the aforementioned bare metals, which use el8). There is a 'run-ost-container.sh' script in the project. I think some people had luck using it, but I never even tried. Again, my personal opinion, as much as I find containers useful and convenient in different situations, this is not one of them - you should be using bare metal. The "backend for OST" is a subject for a whole, new discussion. My opinion here is that we should be using oVirt as backend for OST (as in running oVirt cluster as VMs in oVirt). I'm a big fan of the dogfooding concept. This of course creates a set of new problems like "how can developers work with this", "where do we get the hosting oVirt cluster from" etc. Whooole, new discussion :) Regards, Marcin >> On my bare metal server OST basic run takes 30 mins to complete. This is >> something one >> can work with, but we can do even better. >> >> Thank you for your input and I hope that we can have more people >> involved in OST >> on a regular basis and not once-per-year hackathons. This is a complex >> project, but it's >> really useful. > > +1! > > Thanks and best regards, > >>> Nice. >>> >>> Thanks and best regards, >> >> [1] >> https://github.com/lago-project/lago/blob/7bf288ad53da3f1b86c08b3283ee9c5 >> 118e7605e/lago/providers/libvirt/network.py#L162 [2] >> https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-system-tests/blob/6d5c2a0f9fb3c05afc854712 >> 60065786b5fdc729/ost_utils/ost_utils/pytest/fixtures/engine.py#L105