On 2021-08-27 13:09, Thomas Hoberg wrote:

Ubuntu support: I feel ready to bet a case of beer, that that won't happen.

I'd tend to agree with this. oVirt embeds itself so deep into the RHEL architecture that moving to anything else that doesn't provide the same provisions will be a huge undertaking. You'd almost need to develop a new VDSM from scratch per distro. Supporting latest Fedora however may be an option with a more realistic amount of required effort.

oVirt lives in a niche, which doesn't have a lot of growth left.

Is it though? I'd almost compare oVirt to VMware's suite of products which see a ton of use. The problem oVirt faces is the lack of a consistent and easy deployment model.

It's really designed to run VMs on premise, but once you're fully VM and containers, cloud seems even more attractive and then why bother with oVirt (which has a steep learning curve)?

Depends on market really, there are industries where cloud is just not an option for legal reasons. Cloud is also sometimes significantly more expensive than on-prem in many markets, even within the US.

I still see some potential where you need a fault tolerant redundant physical HCI edge built from small devices like industrial NUCs or Atoms (remote SMB, factories, ships, railroads, military/expedition, space stations). But for that the quality of the software would have to improve in spades.

We use it for this use case (as well as others) it works well. The quality issues with oVirt tend to revolve around deployment. Hosted engine is often a mess, and most don't want to deal with a dedicated machine or VM on non clustered machine to run the engine. We've gone as far as having dedicated head nodes that run critical service VM's with some pacemaker / corosync magic to move those VM's around if needed as a custom solution, simply because hosted engine only works some of the time. oVirt has come quite a long way in this regard, but until you see consistent stable releases that deploy effortlessly on a single node for testing, people wont test it, and it wont be considered option. Even if the software is pretty fantastic beyond that point.

If oVirt in HCI was as reliable as CentOS7 on physical hardware, pure software update support could perhaps be made to cost no more than the hardware and you'd have something really interesting.

Kind of goes along with my previous statement, i haven't had a critical software bug effect my installs in years, but that takes quite a lot of knowledge of the inner working of oVirt to keep it that way. Unfortunately "stable if you know what you are doing" isn't a strong selling point.

But that would require large masses (millions) of deployment to make worthwhile, which can't happen with somebody doing a huge amount of initial subsidies. And who would be able (and motivated) to shoulder that?

I would love RHEV to be that, but it consistently seems to be neglected in the Red Hat lineup of products. RHEV tends to be considerably less buggy and does lag behind significantly at times. A free entry level RHEV tier could change things quite a lot, but it doesn't seem likely in my opinion.

But that's really just my personal opinion, Didi is the much better authority.

Same, I'd love to see some of these issues resolved, but it's going to take a unique situation to make that happen I'm afraid.