Il giorno ven 2 apr 2021 alle ore 17:12 David White via Users <users@ovirt.org> ha scritto:
I'm replying to Thomas's thread below, but am creating a new subject so as not to hijack the original thread.

I'm sure that this topic has come up before.

It has been raised in different places multiple times, just mentioning a few:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/ovirt/comments/lrpl4h/rhv_moving_to_openshift_virtualization_what/
- https://lists.ovirt.org/archives/list/users@ovirt.org/thread/DE3S4POHD37CSGWCGMNTBTCHQERWD7E3/#VIYHOW3WDR6N4APWIXQQONVHNXT3LK5L
- https://lists.ovirt.org/archives/list/users@ovirt.org/thread/A3Z7SWWOTGASTLZKPRNPFGZES5FHIJ7L/#OGMDBFAQD5VDTXJPFTCC2BAPPZ2IDMFK

but don't worry, this one won't be the last :-)

 
I first joined this list last fall, when I began planning and testing with oVirt, but as of the past few weeks, I'm paying closer attention to the mailing list now that I'm actually using oVirt and am getting ready to deploy to a production environment.

I'll also try to jump in and help other people as time permits and as my experience grow.

On behalf of the other users, thanks for doing it!
 

I echo Thomas's concerns here. While I'm thankful for Red Hat's gesture to allow people to use up to 16 Red Hat installs at no charge, I'm concerned about the longevity of oVirt, now that Red Hat is no longer going to support RHV going forward.

What is the benefit to Red Hat / IBM of supporting this platform now that it is no longer being commercialized as a Red Hat product? What is to prevent Red Hat from pulling the plug on this project, similar to what happened to CentOS 8?

CentOS Linux is a downstream project with a trademark owned by Red Hat that delivered rebuilds of a Red Hat product.
oVirt is an upstream open source project that is consumed by Red Hat, Oracle, OpenEuler, KylinOS (and I don't know how many others) for their downstream products.
Despite Red Hat published a life cycle page for Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 will reach end of life in 2026 that has nothing to do with the life of the oVirt project which depends only on how long the community will keep investing in it.

> As a user of oVirt (4.5, installed on Red Hat 8.3), how can I and others help to contribute to the project to ensure its longevity?

Thanks for asking! A few way community can help keep oVirt project healthy:
- Helping new users as you are doing
- Submitting patches (kudos to community user Jean-Louis Dupond who recently pushed patches fixing the issues he found while using oVirt)
- Testing release candidates and reporting issues
- Contributing to oVirt documentation
- Donating hardware / virtual machines (yes: time, good will and code are not enough to keep a project healthy)
- Getting other distributions engaged with oVirt (like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Debian, ...) so they can package oVirt and ship it in their repositories

The more people are going to contribute to the project the longer the community will live, as for any other open source project.

Also a note for any company / community out there willing to put 10 or more developers working on the oVirt project: as strategic contributor you can ask to join the oVirt Board: https://www.ovirt.org/community/about/board.html and help defining the oVirt project future.

 

Or should I really just go find an alternative in the future? (I had been planning to use oVirt for a while, and did some testing last fall, so the announcement of RHV's (commercial) demise was poor timing for me, because I don't have time to switch gears and change my plans to use something else, like Proxmox or something.

From what I've seen, this is a great product, and I guess I can understand Red Hat's decision to pull the plug on the commercial project, now that OpenShift supports full VMs. But my understanding is that OpenShift is a lot more complicated and requires more resources. I really don't need a full kubernetes environment. I just need a stable virtualization platform.

I'm happy to read positive feedback on oVirt :-)
 
--

Sandro Bonazzola

MANAGER, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, EMEA R&D RHV

Red Hat EMEA

sbonazzo@redhat.com   

Red Hat respects your work life balance. Therefore there is no need to answer this email out of your office hours.