9:26 a.m.
On 2020-12-10 15:02, thomas(a)hoberg.net wrote:
I came to oVirt thinking that it was like CentOS: There might be
bugs,
but given the mainline usage in home and coporate labs with light
workloads and nothing special, chances to hit one should be pretty
minor: I like looking for new fronteers atop of my OS, not inside.
I have been runing CentOS/OpenVZ for years in a previous job, mission
critical 24x7 stuff where minutes of outage meant being grilled for
hours in meetings afterwards. And with PCI-DSS compliance certified.
Never had an issue with OpenVZ/CentOS, all those minute goofs where
human error or Oracle inventing execution plans.
Boy was I wrong about oVirt! Just setting it up took weeks. Ansible
loves eating Gigahertz and I was running on Atoms. I had to learn how
to switch from an i7 in mid-installation to have it finish at all. I
the end I had learned tons of new things, but all I wanted was a
cluster that would work as much out of the box as CentOS or OpenVZ.
Something as fundamental as exporting and importing a VM might simply
not work and not even get fixed.
Migrating HCI from CentOS7/oVirt 4.3 to CentOS8/oVirt 4.4 is anything
but smooth, a complete rebuild seems the lesser evil: Now if only
exports and imports worked reliably!
Rebooting a HCI nodes seems to involve an "I am dying!" aria on the
network, where the whole switch becomes unresponsive for 10 minutes
and the fault tolerant cluster on it being 100% unresponsive
(including all other machines on that switch). I has so much fun
resynching gluster file systems and searching through all those log
files for signs as to what was going on!
And the instructions on how to fix gluster issues seems so wonderfully
detailed and vague, it seems one could spend days trying to fix things
or rebuild and restore. It doesn't help that the fate of Gluster very
much seems to hang in the air, when the scalable HCI aspect was the
only reason I ever wanted oVirt.
Could just be an issue with RealTek adapters, because I never oberved
something like that with Intel NICs or on (recycled old) enterprise
hardware
I guess official support for a 3 node HCI cluster on passive Atoms
isn't going to happen, unless I make happen 100% myself: It's open
source after all!
Just think what 3/6/9 node HCI based on Raspberry PI would do for the
project! The 9 node HCI should deliver better 10Gbit GlusterFS
performance than most QNAP units at the same cost with a single 10Gbit
interface even with 7:2 erasure coding!
I really think the future of oVirt may be at the edge, not in the
datacenter core.
In short: oVirt is very much beta software and quite simply a
full-time job if you depend on it working over time.
I can't see that getting any better when one beta gets to run on top
of another beta. At the moment my oVirt experience has me doubt RHV on
RHEL would work any better, even if it's cheaper than VMware.
OpenVZ was simply the far better alternative than KVM for most of the
things I needed from virtualization and it was mainly the hastle of
trying to make that work with RHEL which had me switching to CentOS.
CentOS with OpenVZ was the bedrock of that business for 15 years and
proved to me that Redhat was hell-bent on making bad decisions on
technological direction.
I would have actually liked to pay a license for each of the physical
hosts we used, but it turned out much less of a bother to forget about
negotiating licensing conditions for OpenVZ containers and use CentOS
instead.
BTW: I am going into a meeting tomorrow, where after two years of
pilot usage, we might just decide to kill our current oVirt farms,
because they didn't deliver on "a free open-source virtualization
solution for your entire enterprise".
I'll keep my Atoms running a little longer, mostly because I have
nothing else to use them for. For a first time in months, they show
zero gluster replication errors, perhaps because for lack of updates
there have been no node reboots. CentOS 7 is stable, but oVirt 4.3 out
of support.
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oVirt has more or less always been RHEV upstream, while not necessarily
beta, people using oVirt over RHEV have been subject to the occasional
broken feature or two, at least at early release. If you need the
stability and support, RHEV is the answer. However, we use oVirt and
CentOS 8 in production on a fairly large scale and it's not an
unreasonable amount of work to keep running. It's certainly not a set it
and forget it scenario, but it works very well for us.
There are also a ton of moving parts to running oVirt at scale.
hardware, firmware, network configuration, software, etc... all play
major roles and it's important to test those things individually and
together. We also do a lot of unsupported things, like use custom SPICE
builds for h264 encoding and ZFS backing Gluster. These are things that
would make no sense to do with RHEV/L as it would invalidate any support
we pay for.
I personally do think oVirt delivers on the "a free open-source
virtualization solution for your entire enterprise" stigma, but it is
not a simple drop in and deploy solution. Every aspect of the entire
stack needs planned and verified. That takes time and expertise, and a
whole lot of testing. Im happy with oVirt, and i think CentOS Stream has
the potential to be a net positive by allowing oVirt to target future
RHEL, but a lot of that is still up in the air. Time will tell.