On 12 Feb 2019, at 22:21, Greg Sheremeta <gshereme(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
Hi!
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 1:35 PM Baptiste Agasse <baptiste.agasse(a)lyra-network.com
<mailto:baptiste.agasse@lyra-network.com>> wrote:
Hi all,
We are happy oVirt users for some years now (we started with 3.6, now on 4.2) and we
manage most of our virtualization stacks with it. To provision and manage our machines, we
use the foreman (for bare metal and virtual machines) on top of it. I made some little
contributions to the foreman and other underlying stuff to have a deeper integration with
oVirt, like to be able to select instance type directly from foreman interface/api and we
rely on it. We use instance types to standardize our vms by defining system resources
(memory, cpu and cpu topology) console type, boot options. On top of that we plan to use
templates to apply OS (CentOS 7 and CentOS 6 actually). Having resources definitions
separated from OS installation help us to keep instance types and templates lists small
and don't bother users about some technical underlying stuff. As we are interested in
automating oVirt maintenance tasks and configuration with ansible, I asked at FOSDEM oVirt
booth if there is any ansible module to manage instance types in Ovirt as I didn't
find it in ovirt ansible infra repo. The person to whom I asked the question said that you
are planning to remove instance types from ovirt, and this make me sad :(. So here I am to
ask why do you plan to remove instance types from oVirt. As far as I know, it's fairly
common to have "instance types" / "flavors" / "sizes" on one
side and then templates (bare OS, preinstalled appliances...) on other side and pick one
of each to make an instance. If this first part is missing in future version of ovirt, it
will be a pain point for us. So, my question is, do you really plan to remove instances
type definitely ?
I don't know the future plans (maybe someone else can comment), but I have heard that
instance types are barely used. You might be the first person I know of who is using
them.
The argument for keeping templates but removing instance types is probably that templates
already are effectively instance types. That's why I never use them. For example,
create a CentOS template with 16 CPUs, 32GB RAM, 500GB disk ... that's effectively a
large instance type. Create another template with 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 30GB disk ... that's
effectively a small instance type.
Is there a use case beyond this that instance types provide that templates don’t?
It was supposed to give better abstraction for hw, and more importantly something you can
change later on and it gets reflected in all VMs using that type. Problem with that is
that it got quite complex and we never really found the right cut between what belongs to
Instance and what to Template. It works…but there are few corner cases here and there
which are quite difficult to fix.
But no, we do not plan to remove them. It’s just in a deep maintenance mode where we don’t
really invest time to cover REST, ansible and all the bells and whistles. If it works for
you, great. If not and you would want to submit a fix then please feel free to do so too.
Thanks,
michal