[ovirt-users] User story

[Johannes Spanier]

Hi oVirt community.

I did a short series for tweets @jospanier judging my first time user 
experience with several virtualization platforms and was asked by Sandro 
Bonazzola to elaborate a bit further than what fits into 140 chars.

I had a specific use case: The small-ish learning lab with only 2-3 
nodes and it needs to be free. I also wanted live migration to stay 
flexible with my hosts.

I currently use my lab for to run ~10 virtual CSR1000V routers on free 
ESXi in addition to some real router hardware. I want to expand the lab 
to be able to explore some other technologies as well like network 
automation, SDN, infrastructure as code and the likes.

The lineup for the PoC was oVirt, ESXi, Openstack and Proxmox VE.

I my tweets I was referring to a) the install procedure and b) the 
operational experience.

Here is what I found. These findings are highly subjective and 
debatable. I am aware of that.

Both ESXi and Proxmox VE is trivial to install. You grab the ISO image, 
use a tool like Rufus to make an bootable USB stick or use iLO virtual 
CD functionality and off you go. Both installers do not ask many 
questions and just do their job. After installation ESXi is all ready to 
run. Just open the WebGui and start deploying your first node. With 
Proxmox VE you get a TUI wizard guiding you though the last steps. After 
that the WebGui is ready and you can deploy your first VM immediately.

I found oVirt a bit more involved to install. You have to install the 
Engine on one node and then register the other hosts with it. While that 
process is easy to handle it is a bit more work. A big thing for me was 
that at first glance there did no seem to be a "single node" install. My 
fist impression was that I needed a minimum of two servers. Of course 
later I learned about the Hosted Engine and the All-In-One install.

Do not get me wrong. First time oVirt installation is still easy to 
handle on a quiet afternoon.

Openstack installation compared to that is a PITA nightmare. I tried 
both RDO (TripleO) and Fuel for setup but gave up after two days for 
both, confused about what I actually need to do for a start. Got some 
nodes running with Fuel but was not satisfied. I then followed the 
Openstack manual Install Guide. I have a day job, so it took me about 5 
days to get through the whole procedure, but a least I understood what 
was going on and what I needed to do.

So that was my "first day" experience with those.
Now for the "second day" i.e. operation.

ESXi and Proxmox VE are both very simple to understand. You usually do 
not need a manual to find you way around. Deploying a VM is a breeze. 
oVirt is pretty simple to understand too. But you have to wrap your head 
around the Data Center principle underpinning everything. Its just a bit 
more complicated. On one or two occasions while playing around it was 
unclear at first why my datacenter was offline and I had to consult the 
manual for that. One can immediately feel that multi-tenancy is a big 
benefit of oVirt that is not so obvious in ESXi and Proxmox. But it 
comes with the price of added complexity.

The new WebGui in the ESXi 6.5 I used is sloooow but some functions are 
not available with the vSphere Client Tool any more.
Proxmox and oVirt WebGui are very responsive and "feel" way better. The 
Openstack WebGui is also quite nice.

If you want to build a private multi-teneant scale-out cloud OpenStack 
is probably your best horse in the stable. But for my purpose it was 
just overkill. The process of deploying a simple VM was the most work 
from all four tools.

Wrap-up
For the specific use-case (see above) Proxmox VE was the best fit for 
me, closely followed by oVirt due to the more involved installation. 
ESXi comes in lagging in third place as it does not offer live migration 
in the free version and due to the poor WebGui experience I got. Also 
you have to pay big bucks to get the same functionality as in the other 
three. Openstack is placed at a distant fourth place for this use case.

Hope that was interesting. Do reach out to me on twitter if you have any 
further questions or suggestions.

Regards
Johannes