[Users] oVirt or RHEV ?

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

On 02/06/2014 04:06 PM, Martijn Grendelman wrote:
> This may be the wrong place to ask, but I'm looking for input to form an
> opinion on an "oVirt or RHEV" question within my company.

I suspect you'll get a different answer if you ask here vs Red Hat
sales. I'll try to be objective (disclosure: I work for Red Hat).

> I have been running oVirt for about 5 months now, and I'm quite
> comfortable with its features and maintenance procedures. We are now
> planning to build a private virtualization cluster for hosting clients'
> applications as well as our own. Some people in the company are
> questioning whether we should buy RHEV, but at this point, I can't see
> the benefits.

If you are running any applications which are certified on RHEL, and you
want to ensure you continue getting the benefits of certification, then
you should check if your supplier will support the configuration of
"application on RHEL guest on oVirt managed hypervisor" - Red Hat does
not support the operating system in this configuration, so if certified
applications and support are important, this is something you may want
to consider.

In general, oVirt will get less integration testing and QA than RHEV
(purely a resource allocation issue), so you will occasionally hit bugs
in oVirt that are fixed in the equivalent RHEV release. Bug fixes for
RHEV get into oVirt too, but in the master branch usually, so if you're
running a stable release of oVirt, you may still have the issue, unless
the fix is back-ported to the stable release branch.

On the flip side, features appear first in oVirt, so if there are newer
features you really need, you could use them on oVirt. A few months
later, they will be available in the RHEV product.

Also, while most RHEV documentation will apply to oVirt, that's not
always the case. A recent example was the Node quick start
documentation, as pointed out by a list member. If you like
documentation matching the actual functionality of the project, you can
help fix the oVirt documentation.

Actually, that's a key differentiator - your ability to engage with the
community, help update the wiki, test new features while they're still
in design & ensure they fit your needs, are for me the key selling
points of the project. If you want something that is supported, on which
your apps are certified, and for which you can get good support, and
have a reasonable expectation of more stability, RHEV is for you.


> Can anyone on this list shed a light on when RHEV might be a better
> choice than oVirt? What are the benefits? The trade-offs?
> 
> I am looking for pragmatic, real-world things, not marketing mumbo
> jumbo. That, I can get from redhat.com ;-)

You also got this from redhat.com - hope I didn't disappoint you.

Cheers,
Dave.


-- 
Dave Neary, Lyon, France
Email: dneary at gnome.org / Jabber: nearyd at gmail.com
Ph: +33 950 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13