[ovirt-users] Educational use case question

[Julian De Marchi]

Hey Michael,

 > I am teaching IT subjects in TAFE (a kind of post-secondary technical
 > college) in Australia.

Great news for this tech to be in tafe. I remember my time at Logan tafe 
got me into linux.


> We are currently looking for a virtualisation platform that will allow
> students to install and manage VMs via web interface.
>
> VMware is being proposed but I am trying to get KVM and the RedHat
> ecosystem in the lab as much as possible.
>
> I have reasonable experience with running virt manager on CentOS 7, but
> oVirt is new. I have it installed and running OK but am not sure how to
> proceed with configuration.
>
> I basically want to run a single physical server which will be the KVM
> host, the ISO and data store, and the home of oVirt engine ... in other
> words a complete oVirt-managed KVM virtualisation platform running on one
> physical machine (32GB RAM). It will only ever need to run a handful of VMs
> with little or no real data or load. Is this possible/feasible?
>
> If possible/feasible, where should oVirt engine go ... on the host itself,
> or into a VM guest?

If it was me, I would do the engine install on the metal host itself. 
Will be a lot easier for you, as long as you _know_ you will not be 
adding more metal nodes to the oVirt setup.

I would also be looking into the "VM Pool" feature for your student. 
This will give you a pool of VMs which after use can be reset to a 
default configuration.

> The web interface is what is making oVirt an attractive option at this
> stage, as students will be working from Windows clients on a corporate
> network. Do VM GUI display well in the browser?

I have no experience using oVirt from Windows, but if there is a splice 
client available I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

If you're local to QLD, I am more then happy to help in person.

--julian