Old and new hardware mix
Hi All, I've just joined the mailing list as my organisation needs a new virtualisation solution. VMware is prohibitively expensive for a small company like ours and of all the opensource solutions, oVirt looks like the best fit for our needs. Our existing virtual infrastructure is primarily made up of an old vSphere 5 cluster (expired license on old and out of warranty hardware) and a couple of newer standalone (free) ESXi servers. Both the cluster and the standalones have shared NFS storage so I can move VMs around. I want to take a couple of older (2014ish) servers which will serve as the management host and one compute node initially. Then, I'd like to migrate VMs from one vSphere host at a time to the newly created oVirt cluster and convert the now empty vSphere ESXi hosts into oVirt compute nodes as I go. Firstly - Would new compute host hardware (2020) work in a (2014) based ovirt cluster? If so Would I be able to take advantage of the more advanced features of ovirt like live migration etc.. with a mix of new and old hardware Thanks
On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 12:15 PM <nick@creativitysoftware.net> wrote:
Hi All,
I've just joined the mailing list as my organisation needs a new virtualisation solution. VMware is prohibitively expensive for a small company like ours and of all the opensource solutions, oVirt looks like the best fit for our needs.
Our existing virtual infrastructure is primarily made up of an old vSphere 5 cluster (expired license on old and out of warranty hardware) and a couple of newer standalone (free) ESXi servers. Both the cluster and the standalones have shared NFS storage so I can move VMs around.
I want to take a couple of older (2014ish) servers which will serve as the management host and one compute node initially. Then, I'd like to migrate VMs from one vSphere host at a time to the newly created oVirt cluster and convert the now empty vSphere ESXi hosts into oVirt compute nodes as I go.
Firstly - Would new compute host hardware (2020) work in a (2014) based ovirt cluster?
Generally speaking, yes.
If so
Would I be able to take advantage of the more advanced features of ovirt like live migration etc.. with a mix of new and old hardware
Generally speaking - yes, if you set the cluster cpu level to be the lowest common denominator of your existing machines. Simplest way to do this, I think (didn't verify), is to add to your new empty cluster first the oldest host, as I think the cluster conf is set based on the first host. Best regards, -- Didi
Thanks for the succinct answer. That gives me the confidence to move forward with the migration. Though another thought crossed my mind on reading your reply. After upgrading all host hardware. Can the cluster conf be edited in flight to allow for the new CPU virtualisation extensions, or, would I need to create a new management host and migrate to that?
On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 2:00 PM <nick@creativitysoftware.net> wrote:
Thanks for the succinct answer. That gives me the confidence to move forward with the migration.
Though another thought crossed my mind on reading your reply. After upgrading all host hardware. Can the cluster conf be edited in flight to allow for the new CPU virtualisation extensions,
AFAIK it can. Didn't try this myself.
or, would I need to create a new management host and migrate to that?
That's not needed, but depending on your needs/hardware, you might want to keep two clusters in parallel for some time (e.g. old hardware remains in the old cluster to be used for less important things, etc., and new cluster for new hardware so that you can use the newer features). Best regards, -- Didi
Great thanks Didi. I'm currently writing the proposal so your clarity is very welcome.
As oVirt 4.4.X is using EL8 , you just need to install it with CentOS8 and check if everything goes well. I know that some old hardware was deprecated , but elrepo repository helps alot in such cases. Best Regards, Strahil Nikolov В четвъртък, 12 ноември 2020 г., 12:14:56 Гринуич+2, nick@creativitysoftware.net <nick@creativitysoftware.net> написа: Hi All, I've just joined the mailing list as my organisation needs a new virtualisation solution. VMware is prohibitively expensive for a small company like ours and of all the opensource solutions, oVirt looks like the best fit for our needs. Our existing virtual infrastructure is primarily made up of an old vSphere 5 cluster (expired license on old and out of warranty hardware) and a couple of newer standalone (free) ESXi servers. Both the cluster and the standalones have shared NFS storage so I can move VMs around. I want to take a couple of older (2014ish) servers which will serve as the management host and one compute node initially. Then, I'd like to migrate VMs from one vSphere host at a time to the newly created oVirt cluster and convert the now empty vSphere ESXi hosts into oVirt compute nodes as I go. Firstly - Would new compute host hardware (2020) work in a (2014) based ovirt cluster? If so Would I be able to take advantage of the more advanced features of ovirt like live migration etc.. with a mix of new and old hardware Thanks _______________________________________________ Users mailing list -- users@ovirt.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@ovirt.org Privacy Statement: https://www.ovirt.org/privacy-policy.html oVirt Code of Conduct: https://www.ovirt.org/community/about/community-guidelines/ List Archives: https://lists.ovirt.org/archives/list/users@ovirt.org/message/WYTY6PDFQSQXSI...
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nick＠creativitysoftware.net -
Strahil Nikolov -
Yedidyah Bar David