[ovirt-users] oVirt All-in-One upgrade path and requested improvements

[Nir Soffer]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 6:20 PM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I recently found out that oVirt "deprecated" the All-in-One
> configuration option in oVirt 3.6 and removed it in oVirt 4.0. This is
> a huge problem for me, as it means that my oVirt machines don't have
> an upgrade path.
>
> My experiments with the self-hosted engine have ended in failure for a
> couple of reasons:
> * The hosted engine deploy expects that a FQDN is already paired with
> an IP address. This is obviously false in most home environments, and
> even in the work environment where I use oVirt regularly. There's no
> workaround for this (except having a third machine to run the
> engine!), and this utterly breaks the only way to use oVirt in a
> DHCP-centric environment where I may not control the network
> addressing.
>
> * Other error states have caused the whole thing to break and just
> leave the system a broken mess. With no way to clean up, I'm left
> guessing how to undo everything, which is hellish and leads me to just
> wipe the whole system and start over.
>
> In addition, I was hoping that there would be improvements with the
> single system case, rather than destruction of this capability. Some
> of the improvements are things I think would be useful in even a
> multi-node setup, too.
>
> For example, I would like to see live migration capabilities with
> local storage across datacenters, as this capability in vMotion makes
> deployments a lot more flexible. Sometimes, local storage is really
> the only way to get the kind of speed needed for some workloads, and
> being able to offer some kind of HA for VMs on local storage would be
> excellent. In addition to being useful for all-in-one setups, it's
> quite useful for self-hosted engine configurations, too.
>
> It's also rather irritating that there's no way to migrate stuff from
> shared storage to local storage and back. On top of that, datacenters
> that have local storage can't have shared storage or vice versa.
>
> On top of that, it looks like the all-in-one code is being kept around
> anyway for the oVirt Live stuff, so why not just keep the capability
> and improve it? oVirt should become the best virtualization solution
> for everyone, not just people who have access to huge datacenters
> where all the conditions are perfect.

I agree that hosted engine is not a replacement for all in one
configuration. It adds lot of unneeded complexity that is not useful
for single host use case.

Can you explain why you use ovirt for your single host use case,
and not simpler solution like virt-manager?

ovirt adds lot of complexity and overhead that is not required for
running couple of vms on a single machine with local storage.

Nir