[Users] oVirt or RHEV ?

[René Koch]

Hi Martijn,

That's a good question and not too easy to answer.
I work as a Solution Architect and my company is selling both - RHEV and
oVirt consulting and support. The reason for doing both is, that we want
to give users a choice which solution fits better.

The main benefits (in my opinion) of RHEV are:

- Support with SLAs
Red Hat provides support for RHEV with service levels. For oVirt you
have to wait until someone of the developers or community members helps
you on the mailing list or in IRC (or you buy support from a company
with provides it).

- Updates for each release for 3 years
You receive for all releases (RHEV 3.1, 3.2,...) 3 years of support and
updates. oVirt provides bugfix releases for the actual release (so you
want get bugfix updates for 3.2 anymore, you have to upgrade to 3.3).
For me this is the biggest advantage of RHEV.

- Red Hat Knowledge Base
Red Hat Knowledge Base is one of the best knowledge bases and it helps
you greatly solving issues and gives useful tips. I use the knowledge
base a lot and wouldn't want to miss it for any Red Hat product.

- Stability
RHEV is tested by a qa team and the releases are really stable. oVirt
has newer features which are less tested. I upgrade oVirt release only
to .1 releases (e.g. 3.2.x -> 3.3.1), not to .0 to avoid issues.

- Guest agents
Guest agents and RHEV tools are packaged for RHEL and Windows guests and
are working fine. When using oVirt you miss some of the functionality of
Windows guest tools or have to copy it from different locations. For
other os'es it doesn't matter if using RHEV or oVirt.

- Application / os support
You should consider if your applications and operating systems are
supported in oVirt as well. All apps certified for RHEL are certified
for RHEV as well.


Main benefits of oVirt:

- Newest features
oVirt gives you the latest and greatest. So it will take some time until
this feature is available in RHEV, too (due to testing).

- No subscription coasts
You don't have to buy subscriptions for an oVirt environment, so it
saves money. But on the other hand it can also cost you more money, if
you have to spend a lot of time in troubleshooting or with upgrading
(especially with possible upgrading issues) or having down times of your
environment.


It's not too easy to say if you should use RHEV or oVirt.
I hope I could help you making a decision with my explanations above.
You could also have both - a RHEV setup for production vms and an oVirt
setup for development and qa vms.


Regards,
René



On Thu, 2014-02-06 at 16:06 +0100, Martijn Grendelman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 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 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.
> 
> 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 ;-)
> 
> Best regards,
> Martijn.
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