Hello all,

I do development operations for a part of a software division of a large multinational. I'm an experienced user of VMWare and Amazon AWS, soon to be pushed onto Azure, and I've found a common thread among all solutions - they are all expensive enough that my budget will certainly not be approved with them. I'm deferred to the IT part of the organisation, which operates too slowly and inefficiently (in terms of both cost and time) for my requirements. This is what led me to RHEV, and ultimately to oVirt. This is a feasibility study for what may ultimately be a RHEV-based data center in a new office, and if I succeed we will be doing more on a fixed budget by using more RHEV and less Azure.

I spent the weekend working with oVirt and I'm very impressed. I had no idea such a comprehensive enterprise-class solution was even available. Being a complete newcomer, I started without a clue and after a weekend had set up a nearly-working data centre including an oVirt hypervisor node, all on old Dell notebooks loaned to me temporarily by our IT group. I started with RHEV but decided to use oVirt for two reasons - one being to see what's possible with the latest and greatest, the other because RHEV required some licensing I've not yet purchased. Long term it'll have to be RHEV for enterprise support reasons I'm sure many are familiar with.

There are a few things I found, from a newcomer's perspective, very unclear.

What is oVirt, vs oVirt engine, vs oVirt node, vs oVirt host. Try to find documentation on any of these and get spammed with references to the others. I think I've worked out that these are the collective suite of products, the management centre, the bare-metal hypervisor, and participating member servers, respectively.
Which versions of CentOS/Fedora/oVirt Node are compatible at which oVirt compatibility level? This would normally be addressed in the release notes. It was also confusing to discover oVirt node 3.2.1 is compatible at the 3.5 level. The answer to this remains unclear but I'm trying to use Fedora 22 across the board now with oVirt node 3.2.1 and this seems to be working, although I haven't gotten a server node into a cluster yet, only oVirt nodes.
Storage domains - much doco about them being needed and how to configure them but nothing about what they are or why they are needed. I would have expected an oVirt node to be capable of both data and ISO storage but apparently there needs to be an NFS or iSCSI filesystem there first? And there's local storage vs shared, another concept much talked about how to prepare and add it but not explained why one would want to do that or what it means.

I think with further internet combing and by trial-and-error I'm very likely to figure it all out. I hope all goes well and implement this stuff in our new data centre and then I'd be keen to contribute some of my own tech writing.

Meanwhile, I hope to be active on this mailing list and I thank everyone in advance for sharing their oVirt experience. For any who are looking at the doco thanks much for the plethora of stuff out there already and I hope the above bullet points help you understand where doco most needs more attention. At least from the perspective of one who has just come across oVirt.

Kind Regards,

Ken Marsh

Brisbane, Australia