Thomas, your e-mail created too much food for thought... as usual I would
say, remembering the past ;-)
I try to reply to some of them online below, putting my own personal
considerations on the table
On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 11:44 AM Thomas Hoberg <thomas(a)hoberg.net> wrote:
Redhat's decision to shut down RHV caught Oracle pretty
unprepared, I'd
guess, who had just shut down their own vSphere clone in favor of a RHV
clone a couple of years ago.
I don't think so. I tried for quite some time their previous solution,
based on Xen, and simply it didn't work as expected in terms of many
enterprise class needed functionalities. Then I switched to oVirt and/or
RHV, depending on customer needs. And I think Oracle did the same. If I
remember correctly there was also a migration path.
Oracle is even less vocal about their "Oracle Virtualization" strategy,
they don't even seem to have a proper naming convention or branding.
I don't agree. Even if not crystal clear and somehow confusing for
newcomers, they called it Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) since
the beginning, making it clear that in their regard they see it as an
extension of the operating system (Oracle Linux). In fact if you buy the
Premier Support level of the OS, you automatically get also support for
OLVM. if you use it.
Their previous solution branding was Oracle VM (or sometimes Oracle VM
Server)
Here you can still find all the solutions described, including VirtualBox
(and recently Kata Containers):
https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/
But they have been pushing out OV releases without a publicly
announced
EOL almost a year behind Redhat for the last years.
In the past I asked and they told me that they planned to continue with
OLVM and its support even after RHV EOL.
And the 12th December announcement seems to confirm that.
Their product is a fork of oVirt.
And after a 4.4 release in September 22, a few days ago on December 12th
actually a release 4.5 was made public.
Great news, in my opinion
I didn't spot it yet, but you are right and here you can find the announce
page:
https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/post/oracle-linux-virtualization-...
I've operated oVirt 4.3 with significant quality issues for some
years and
failed to make oVirt 4.4 work with any degree of acceptable stability but
Oracle's variant of 4.4 proved to be rather better than 4.3 on CentOS7 with
no noticable bugs, especially in the Hyperconverged setup that I am using
with GlusterFS.
The whole point here is that in my opinion GlusterFS is totally not ready
for enterprise use, based on my past tests in oVirt context.
In other terms, possibly the problems you are describing was more dependant
on GlusterFS configuration/tuning/bugs than on oVirt/OLVM versions
themselves
Just my opinion
I assumed that this was because Oracle based their 4.4 in fact on RHV
4.4
and not oVirt, but since they're not telling, who knows?
I don't think that. Based on licensing they have to let their sources
publicly available.
And in fact here you find all you need in case you want to crosscheck:
https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-8.html
In the link above you can find both 4.4 and 4.5 sources, together with the
OS and UEK kernels ones, because as said above, they consider OLVM an
extension of the operating system functionalities
One issue with 4.4 was that Oracle is pushing their UE-Kernel and
that
created immediate issues e.g. with VDO missing modules for UEK and other
stuff, but that was solved easily enough by using the RHEL kernel.
They support both Red Hat Compatible kernels and UEK ones. In case of
problems I think you can submit bugs.
The correct entry point for that for not paying customers should be this
one if I'm not wrong:
https://github.com/oracle/oracle-linux/issues
With 4.5 Oracle obviously can't use RHV 4.5 as a base, because there is no
such thing with RHV declared EOL and according to Oracle their 4.5 is based
on oVirt 4.5.4, which made the quality of that release somewhat
questionable, but perhaps they have spent the year that has passed since
productively killing bugs... only to be caught by surprise again, I
presume, by an oVirt release 4.5.5 on December 1st, that no one saw coming!
I think you well understand that sw developer processing is not an easy
one, and that it comprises feature freezes and such...
If Oracle well before planned to come out with a 4.5 release based on a
fork of a well established 4.5.4 release, it is not so important to rebase
all the work on the just released oVirt 4.5.5. They had better release it
anyway after their quality testing and then update inside the normal
maintenance phase. And based on what oVirt 4.5.5 contains, it could be that
some of oVirt 4.5.5 features/fixes are already there in OLVM 4.5
At the moment, from release notes we know that:
"
Release 4.5 of Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager is based on oVirt
community release version 4.5.4, which includes a number of bug fixes and
support for new features:
"
Long story slightly shorter, I've been testing Oracle's 4.5
variant a bit
and it's not without issues.
Please report them, eventually both here and in the github link above.
But much worse, Oracle's variant of oVirt seems to be entirely without any
community that I could find.
Here I totally agree with you. They have specific forums but not so well
organized, at least for OLVM related problems.
And also here in this list they didn't give much information regarding
roadmaps and nothing regarding their just released 4.5 OLVM (if I didn't
miss it).
Now oVirt has been a somewhat secret society for years, but compared
to
what's going on with Oracle this forum is teaming with life!
I don't understand what you mean here. As said many times it has always
been a Red Hat sponsored open source project (with almost only Red Hat paid
developers working on it) and a base for their commercial offering of RHV.
Something similar to OKD for OCP, RDO for OSP, ...
[snip]
But with 4.5 it seems that UEK has become a baked-in dependency: the OV
team doesn't even seem to do any testing with the Redhat kernel any more.
Or not with the HCI setup, which has become deprecated somewhere in oVirt
4.4... Or not with the Cockpit wizard, which might be in a totally untested
state, or....
If it is so, it is a bug, because inside the release notes of 4.5, for both
the Engine Host and the Hypervisor Host there is clearly stated that the
requirement is:
"
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
Release 7, or Red Hat Compatible Kernel
"
I didn't go through all the documentation but I didn't find any information
regarding Red Hat Compatible Kernel being deprecated.
Please point me to it if you have one.
Doing the same install on OL 8.9 with OV 4.4, however, did work just
fine
and I was even able to update to 4.5 afterwards, which was a nice
surprise...
In theory paying customers are expected to be able to upgrade from OLVM 4.4
to 4.5. So it should not be a surprise.
...that I could not repeat on my physical test farm using three Atoms.
There switching to the UEK kernel on the hosts caused issues, hosts were
becoming unresponsive, file systems inaccessible, even if they were
perfectly fine at the Gluster CLI level and in the end the ME VM simply
would not longer start. Switching back to the Redhat kernel resolved things
there.
Again: I don't consider GlusterFS ready for prime time enterprise customers
in the virtualization context.
And also the GlusterFS support community, when required in the past, was
not able to provide timely support, unfortunately
Why do you think they only support Ceph in both OCP and OSP?
See also here their support for their Gluster based commercial product
(RHGS aka Red Hat Gluster Storage):
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2356261
only supported for RHV and OCP only up to version 3. no support for OCP 4.
https://access.redhat.com/articles/3403951 (this one requires login)
But again, it is only my opinion
In short, switching between the Redhat kernel and UEK, which should be
100% transparent to all things userland including hypervisors, doesn't work.
What are the technical considerations that let you argue that swapping from
a RH EL 8.9 kernel (based on upstream 4.18 + backports) to an UEK R7 one
(based on upstream 5.15) should be totally transparent? And considering
also that KVM, at the base of the hypervisor functionalities, is a kernel
module?
Perhaps you are oversimplifying a bit
But my attempts to go with a clean install of 4.5 on a Redhat kernel or
UEK is also facing issues. So far the only thing that has worked was a
single node HCI install using UEK and OV 4.5 and upgrading to OV 4.5 on a
virtualized triple node OV 4.4 HCI cluster.
Anyone else out there trying these things?
Unfortunately I changed my job and I'm not so active in the context of
oVirt and its variants at the moment
I can try in a lab used for other things and report back, anyway, if I have
time.
Good news you have informed the community and that there is this possible
choice now
I was mostly determined to move to Proxmox VE, but Oracle's OV
4.5 seemed
to be handing a bit of a life-line to oVirt and the base architecture is
just much more powerful (or less manual) than Proxmox, which doesn't have a
management engine.
I never worked with Proxmox, so I have no opinion here.
Gianluca