So I just finished migrating my 4.3 engine to 4.4 on a brand new RHvEL8 install; next step is to upgrade the hosts. When I first started with oVirt I used my own CentOS installs, but quickly decided that it made no sense for my use case. Now I am looking at upgrading from 4.3 to 4.4 and asking myself the same question. Up to now oVirt node has been using the same exact OS I would have used +/- a few extra packages, but with the traditional CentOS going away it really depends on what the new oVirt nodes are going to be based on. I have a feeling the answer to that question is CentOS Stream, which I don't feel comfortable with for this task. While I am sure the developers will test the combination before releasing a new node, they are still only testing whatever specific hardware combination they have. There could be numerous weird bugs that will only show up in certain situations. If Stream was as stable as an EL release, there wouldn't be EL releases. I also appreciate the fa ct that oVirt is itself a work in progress, but the stable branch is considerably more like an EL release than a stream. Anyway, back to the point. Just want to confirm the future for node is stream before I go wasting time building my own EL8 hosts.

As long as CentOS was downstream of RHEL, it was a base so solid it might have been better than the oVirt node image, even if that was theoretically going through some full stack QA testing. But with CentOS [Up]Stream you get beta quality for the base and then the various acquired parts that make up the oVirt house of cards on top. If then the oVirt node OS were to go through full-stack QA, that could be quite the better choice. But I'm more and more inclined to believe that the if is a false and any testing is just unit testing.

Around Christmas VDO got dropped from a kernel update of CentOS8 (still non-stream) and my 4.4 oVirt HCI farm dropped dead, until I found out what happend.

To me that was the final straw: I will phase oVirt out with CentOS7. IBM may have a few more paying customers, but oVirt will lose the edge, the only place outside the cloud where RedHat can grow without being taxed by the cloud service providers.