[ovirt-users] Greetings and observations from an oVirt noob

[Kenneth Marsh]

Hello all,

I do development operations for a part of a software division of a large
multinational. I'm an experienced user of VMWare and Amazon AWS, soon to be
pushed onto Azure, and I've found a common thread among all solutions -
they are all expensive enough that my budget will certainly not be approved
with them. I'm deferred to the IT part of the organisation, which operates
too slowly and inefficiently (in terms of both cost and time) for my
requirements. This is what led me to RHEV, and ultimately to oVirt. This is
a feasibility study for what may ultimately be a RHEV-based data center in
a new office, and if I succeed we will be doing more on a fixed budget by
using more RHEV and less Azure.

I spent the weekend working with oVirt and I'm very impressed. I had no
idea such a comprehensive enterprise-class solution was even available.
Being a complete newcomer, I started without a clue and after a weekend had
set up a nearly-working data centre including an oVirt hypervisor node, all
on old Dell notebooks loaned to me temporarily by our IT group. I started
with RHEV but decided to use oVirt for two reasons - one being to see
what's possible with the latest and greatest, the other because RHEV
required some licensing I've not yet purchased. Long term it'll have to be
RHEV for enterprise support reasons I'm sure many are familiar with.

There are a few things I found, from a newcomer's perspective, very unclear.

   - What is oVirt, vs oVirt engine, vs oVirt node, vs oVirt host. Try to
   find documentation on any of these and get spammed with references to the
   others. I think I've worked out that these are the collective suite of
   products, the management centre, the bare-metal hypervisor, and
   participating member servers, respectively.
   - Which versions of CentOS/Fedora/oVirt Node are compatible at which
   oVirt compatibility level? This would normally be addressed in the release
   notes. It was also confusing to discover oVirt node 3.2.1 is compatible at
   the 3.5 level. The answer to this remains unclear but I'm trying to use
   Fedora 22 across the board now with oVirt node 3.2.1 and this seems to be
   working, although I haven't gotten a server node into a cluster yet, only
   oVirt nodes.
   - Storage domains - much doco about them being needed and how to
   configure them but nothing about what they are or why they are needed. I
   would have expected an oVirt node to be capable of both data and ISO
   storage but apparently there needs to be an NFS or iSCSI filesystem there
   first? And there's local storage vs shared, another concept much talked
   about how to prepare and add it but not explained why one would want to do
   that or what it means.

I think with further internet combing and by trial-and-error I'm very
likely to figure it all out. I hope all goes well and implement this stuff
in our new data centre and then I'd be keen to contribute some of my own
tech writing.

Meanwhile, I hope to be active on this mailing list and I thank everyone in
advance for sharing their oVirt experience. For any who are looking at the
doco thanks much for the plethora of stuff out there already and I hope the
above bullet points help you understand where doco most needs more
attention. At least from the perspective of one who has just come across
oVirt.

Kind Regards,

Ken Marsh
Brisbane, Australia
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