[ovirt-users] ovirt high points

[Yedidyah Bar David]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 8:01 PM, Christopher Cox <ccox at endlessnow.com> wrote:
> On 09/07/2017 06:33 AM, david caughey wrote:
>>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> I'm giving a demo of our new 3 node oVirt deployment next week and am
>> looking for some high points that I can give to the Managers that will be a
>> sell point.
>
>
> Could be hard to sell.  It's not like VMware (all in all) is deficient
> functionality wise.
>
>> If you could help with the below questions I would really appreciate it:
>>
>> Who are the big users of oVirt??
>
>
> We use oVirt in production.  We have about 130 VMs on a 9 node cluster using
> Dell blades.  It houses both our test and production VMs.  We have a
> separate oVirt setup for development hosting probably about 20 VMs (maybe
> less), it's an 7 node cluster (but much lesser blades there).
>
> In both cases they are connected to Equalogic iSCSI SAN equipment with
> multiple tiers of storage.  Each production blade has 4 x 10gbit iSCSI
> (multi)paths to storage.  The production blade subsystem uses multiple
> 40Gbit links, for iSCSI storage and for LAN. Just 10Gbit links and 1Gbit
> paths on the development blades and subsystem.
>
> Both use a dedicated oVirt management host.
>
> The production(and test) blades run oVirt 3.6 and the dev blades are oVirt
> 3.5.
>
> About 2 years ago we migrated our production blades from oVirt 3.4 on older
> blades and older SAN equipment to oVirt 3.6 on new blades and new SAN
> storage.  We used oVirt's export domain to facilitate the move.
>
> We will be migrating off the development cluster and we are setting up a new
> cluster on the same DC as our production area which will be used to house
> both test and development.  Thus we are moving to just the one oVirt 3.6
> (we're adding 5 extra blades for that cluster).
>
> Btw, our VMs include multiple version of CentOS, Windows Server and Windows
> desktops (and even some docker nodes, but we're redoing all of that).  Our
> VMs include about 10 large PostgreSQL database servers, some MySQL, several
> Jboss servers, many web microservices (Springboot) servers and lost of
> application infrastructure servers.
>
>>
>> Why oVirt and not vMware??
>> (we are a big vMware house so free doesn't cover it)
>
>
> Uh free, and to be honest, that's the best reason to do this IMHO.
>
>>
>> What is the future for oVirt??
>
>
> Unknown.  But pretty sure Red Hat will want to keep RHEV around, which means
> oVirt probably will be here for quite some time.
>
>>
>> Why do you use oVirt??
>
>
> Free.
>
>>
>> Any links or ideas appreciated,
>
>
> oVirt is NOT VMware.  But if you do things "well" oVirt works quite well.
> Follow the list to see folks that didn't necessarily do things "well" (sad,
> but true).
>
> I inherited this oVirt... not ideal for blades because it's better to have
> lots of networks.  We just have two blade fabrics, one for SAN and one for
> the rest, and it would be nice to have ovirtmgmt and migration networks be
> isolated.  With that said, with our massively VLAN'd setup, it does work and
> has been very reliable.  For performance reasons, I recommend that you
> attempt to dedicate a host for SPM, or at least keep the number of VMs
> deployed there to a minimum.  There are tweaks in the setup to keep VMs off
> the SPM node (talking mainly if you have a massively combined network like I
> have currently).

Do you routinely have many storage operations going on (create/remove vm,
create/remove disk, take/remove a snapshot etc.)?

If not, do you still recommend a dedicated SPM host?

If yes, why?

See also:

https://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/storage/decommission-master-domain-and-spm/

It was panned to happen in 4.0, didn't happen yet. No idea about concrete
future plans.

>
> We've survived many bad events with regards to SAN and power, which is a
> tribute to oVirt's reliability.  However, you can shoot yourself in the foot
> very easily with oVirt... so just be careful.
>
> Is VMware better?  Yes.  Is it more flexible than oVirt?  Yes. Is it more
> reliable than oVirt? Yes.  In other words, if money is of no concern, VMware
> and VCenter.
>
> We will likely never do VMware here due to cost (noting, that the cost is in
> VCenter, and IMHO, it's not horrible, but I do not control the wallet here,
> and we tend to prefer FOSS here... and FOSS is my personal preference as
> well).
>
> Companies generally speaking just want something that works.  And oVirt does
> work.  But if money is of no concern and you need the friendliness of
> something VCenter like (noting that not everyone needs VCenter or RHEV-M or
> oVirt Manager), then VMware is still better.
>
> If you don't need something VCenter like, I can also so say that libvirt
> (KVM) and virt-manager is also reasonable, and we use that as well.  But we
> also have a (free) ESXi (because we have to, forced requirement).
>
> The ovirtmgmt web ui is gross IMHO.  It's a perfect example of an overweight
> UI where a simplified UI would have been cleaner, faster and better.  Just
> because you know how to write thousands of lines of javascript doesn't mean
> you should.  Not everything needs to act like a trading floor application or
> facebook.  The art of efficient UI design has been lost.  With that said,
> the RESTful i/f part is nice.  Nice to the point of not needing the SDK.

You might want to have a look at:

https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-web-ui

That's a replacement ui (not admin), included in 4.1, will replace
user portal in 4.2.

>
> Finally, VMware can be expensive.  It's not a "one time" purchase.  It's HAS
> TO BE ongoing.  And it can get very expensive if not understood. With that
> said, if you have anything Microsoft in the enterprise, you already
> understand and are prepared to throw cash for IT infrastructure.  If you do
> go VMware, make sure to use a hefty Vcenter host as upgrades to VCenter
> involve a lot of bloat and waste.
>
> VMware can be a real "pain" support wise.  They can deprecate your entire
> hypervisor HW stack, especially true in a major release.  They can even
> deprecate HW in a minor release (I have fallen victim to this).
>
> Thus, again, if you have money to burn and have relatively short HW life
> cycles (less than 5 years for sure), AND that includes OS life cycles as
> well, then VMware is probably ok.  Not saying there aren't some problems on
> the oVirt side as well, just saying VMware has more expensive warts. And
> thus "paid support" becomes somewhat humorous (but in a sad sort of way).
>
> (oVirt community support ROCKS!  Just saying...)

(If I was from Red Hat sales, I think I'd be quite happy with your reply :-)
As an oVirt developer, I'd probably ask, about many of your specific points
above: Did you open a bug/RFE about this? Because, you know, opening bugs
is also part of being part of the community).

Best,
-- 
Didi