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
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw