[fedora-virt] fedora virt versus RHEV - libvirt tools availability

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 02:08:35PM -0700, Dale Bewley wrote:
> I hope this doesn't seem too far off topic.
> 
> In my current position we are a vmware shop. With a few dozen machines
> in a handful of clusters, multipath fibrechannel storage, lots of live
> migrations, etc.
> 
> In my past position, I did everything on Fedora with the help of virsh,
> guestfish and all their friends, and life was very good. I could
> provision machines with virt-install and koan. I could tweak the machine
> definitions in XML. I could login and get a vm console very easy.
> 
> That environment was much smaller and all storage was essentially direct
> attached and there was no live migration. Moving to vmware has a few
> niceties, but feels encumbered.

As an aside, you can edit VMware virtual machines using sshfs to mount
the /vmfs directory from the server to a Fedora or RHEL machine, and
libguestfs / guestfish.  I really should write up all the details ...

> I now want to evaluate RHEV against vmware, but I'm immediately taken
> aback to see the need for a windows mgt console, and troubled by an
> apparent burying of the libvirt API with a user push towards a REST API.
> Maybe my perception is off. I'm going to RH Summit and will get some
> more education next week.

When we acquired Qumranet (RHEV-M) it used its own backend.  We've
gradually transitioned this over to libvirt so the latest version now
uses libvirt for VM lifecycle management, and future versions will
expand this for storage and more.

> Tools like guestfish and virsh are some of the drivers causing me to
> explore vmware alternatives. If RHEV occludes those tools I'm left
> wondering what do I get that I can't get from Fedora with an apparently
> more open toolset. Other than the long term support.
> 
> What are others doing out there? How large have you scaled up a Fedora
> solution (libvirt, virt-manager, virsh, kvm)? Are you performing live
> migrations reliably? How do you feel about RHEV? 
> 
> Anyone coming to RH Summit?

Matt and I are doing a talk at the Summit:

http://www.redhat.com/summit/sessions/index.html#133

Everyone welcome!

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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