[ovirt-users]Re: Blog Post - Using Ceph Only Storage For oVirt Datacenter by Sandro Bonazzola – Wednesday 14 July 2021

Hi Matthew, On Tue, Sep 13, 2022 at 12:26 PM Matthew J Black <matthew(a)peregrineit.net&gt; wrote: > Well, if I can put my $0.02 worth in... > > What I've been trying to do is set up an oVirt cluster (v4.5.X) to use a Ceph (Quincey) cluster as the back-end via iSCSI. One thing I found was that up-to-date, relevant information from both the Ceph-side *and* the oVirt side on how to do this was... hard to find, not explained very well, and often out of date (like this relevant Blog post, if it is now out of date, and based on the posts of this thread that is what it appears to be) - this also applies to pre-installing / not pre-installing OpenVSwitch (see my other thread from today). I agree. And, let me take back my previous reply, about updating the blog post. A blog post is, by definition, out-of-date, very soon after it's published. It's inside a blog, right? A kind of diary. You don't update your paper diary after you wrote some entry in it, right? Project/product Documentation, OTOH, is supposed/expected to be kept up-to-date over time. If a doc/guide is out-of-date, you'd naturally consider this a bug. Not so for a blog post. In oVirt, it's basically the same. Blog posts, here, are mainly POCs - demonstrations that something is doable. The fact that you do not find oVirt-on-Ceph in the main documentation is not a mistake - it's simply not considered (yet? See below) stable/supportable enough to enter that space. > So I've been experimenting in a test environment (using Rocky Linux - initially v9 but now v8.6), tearing down and re-building (physical) boxes, and making notes for myself as I go. And, as may be implied from this and my other thread from today, the types of problems and issues I'm encountering are relatively trivial and easily answered **once I can get on to someone who knows** (those issues that aren't "self-inflicted", of course). > > And for what it is worth, I am extremely grateful for the help I've received today - thank you all! > > So if people are talking about doco, etc, then this might be worth considering as well (ie, how to go about doing what I've been doing). > > I'm reluctant to write this up myself for a number of reasons, including (but not limited to) the issue of maintainability, the fact that I'm not experienced enough with oVirt to hold myself out as an "expert", and because of an incident in the past where I ended up taking a lot of flack that wasn't really my fault (the old "once bitten, twice shy"). I understand very well. The fact is, that no-one else did, right? If no-one does, it will never happen. What you can do: - Create a ticket/bug/issue for tracking this. Despite what perhaps some people might think, this isn't useless, even if you are not going to handle it yourself, nor know about anyone that is. - Include there what you already know and had to do. This most definitely does not put you in any position of authority - I think no-one will expect you to keep a comment in an issue up-to-date. It's less authoritative than a blog post, right? Just a comment. But it's extremely helpful, for both people that want to do what you want to do, those that want to actually handle the issue (by writing docs), and those wanting to review the eventual doc patches. - It also makes it much easier to find, link, etc., so will likely get more traction than a thread like current. I'd like to use this opportunity to add some more thoughts, at-most-tangentially related to the current thread. Speaking only for myself, not for Red Hat. Red Hat already decided that the future lies in containers, and people that still need VMs for their legacy stuff (as considered by Red Hat) should handle that inside OpenShift using CNV. See also e.g. [1] for what might eventually, when it matures enough, be a more-or-less replacement for oVirt's functionality, although definitely not for oVirt's behavior. This means, in particular, that if Red Hat decides to support so-called Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) setups (or it might already have done, no idea), it will be based on OpenShift/CNV + Ceph, not RHV. AFAIU, IMHO, etc. But this does not mean that oVirt-on-Ceph HCI is impossible - it means that for this to happen, someone else should do most of the work. We (as in, Red Hat employees working on oVirt) will definitely be able to help if/where needed, but can't be expected to do the bulk of the work. I personally still think that oVirt is most probably the best small-/medium-scale Open Source clustered virtualization system. But to keep it thriving, more people should help. Including those that think that they are not experienced enough :-) > "Anyway, it's just a thought - you all have a good day." - Beau Of The Fifth Column Thanks for your message. I think it was helpful. [1] https://okd-virtualization.github.io/ Best regards,