Switching from Hyper-V to oVirt

For quite some time I have heard that Hyper-V was a low player when it came to virtualization. It came with Windows and was the hypervisor of choice, but it had its limitations. In my environment, we had local storage and no clustering of hosts and consequently no high availability or fail over. This brought the first pain point – we need high availability.

On one of my hosts, the broadcom Ethernet driver kept triggering flow control and would not resume causing all of the VM Guests to go offline. This triggered the second pain point – I need high availability yesterday.

What matters most in a hypervisor environment is the tools you use to manage it.

I took this principle as a guide when searching for a hypervisor environment. I first looked at Hyper-V and the new licensing costs it would accrue. Next I looked at the popular VMWare ESXi, but I heard the neat features were at a premium price and all I needed was high availability. I looked at Open Source versions like KVM, Xen, and OpenStack (which appeared to be too big for my 40 VM environment). Then I found RHEV’s community version – oVirt. It had all the bells and whistles I needed – Linux hosts and high availability.

oVirt’s install documents were surprisingly simple as I quickly found 3 servers to set up: an engine server, a file server, and a VM Host. Once set up, I tinkered with it, and to my delight – everything worked right out of the box (on old hardware too!) My next step was to install a few VMs and test the high availability features. It was evident that oVirt was the solution to my pain points.

4 comments

  1. Same here. I tried Proxmox for the first time after using Hyper v. The performance / IO speeds are terrible. I couldnt even run 2 vms successfully and gave up on it. On my way to try OVirt

  2. Look for proxmox. You can have HA without license costs. This linux distro is debian based and come with Openvz Containers and KVM. You can do a cluster to hot migrations or, if you have a storage, HA.
    The next Mayor Proxmox upgrade will change OpenVZ for Docker. Y have 3 Proxmox in cluster and is, with some details to pulish, an excellent choice.

    1. I’m with Awippler. We currently have Proxmox in production. It is simply not a robust suite. They make poor choices in terms of packaging and platform structure. They previously had a mangled mess of CentOS kernel and Debian userspace. I think that their current release is somehow worse. Seriously, a custom Ubuntu kernel for your hypervisor? Nope.

      “You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit http://www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.”
      No. I know that it’s Apache licensed and I can therefore legally remove the notice from the code, but no.

      We are currently in the process of migrating to oVirt. I love it. I see the future of open-source on-premise server virtualization and it is oVirt (and RHEV).

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