oVirt VS triton

Not _really_, due to a number of things around automation that you needed vCenter to run. Or at least that's how it was for a very long time.

In the early to middle days of virtualization, when corps had huge datacenters that were split between bare metal and virtualized solutions, I needed test labs of my own to more quickly and easily test different scenarios, then pause and save them to reduce use in the future.

The software chop shop I was working at had some solutions for lab provisioning but they were inefficient. Plus, I wanted spare machines for personal use too. Not really ideal to use personal resources to enhance my capabilities at work, but they were truly test-only with no customer data entering them.

I used ESX for a long time. Even kludged together a little automation. Then I uh borrowed a vCenter license for a long while. I changed jobs and decided that since most of the environments were useless I should really kick VMware to the curb.

I tried OpenStack, but it was too painful of a setup for a single hard node or even two nodes. Ovirt, on the other hand, was PERFECT. This is the open source upstream to RHV. Great integration with Ansible and a number of other tools, and there's very little configuration effort required after the base install, unlike with VMware.

I enjoyed that for a while through the orchestration wars, spinning up 6 and 8 node clusters of Kubernetes, mesosphere, and Swarm just to have a clean environment to test things out. Then it was just kubernetes, and configuration changed and improved a bit. At one point I even got kubernetes autoscaling to work, where load levels on a cluster would trigger calls to Ovirt to spin up additional nodes and add them to the cluster.

The first of my servers ran about 13 years until I put it into storage last year. It still runs great. I calculated out costs once for equivalent 24/7 resources on AWS, and they would have run $300-400k to have equivalent computer power at my disposal. For an investment of around $6k on that server plus a small monthly bump to my electric costs.

Of course, that doesn't count labor. But really, there was relatively little labor involved after moving to Ovirt compared to the ESX ecosystem, where there are a lot of frequently recurring decisions to be made between spending your time or paying ridiculous licensing costs to ease the workflow, both for the platform itself and for anything that integrates with it.

https://www.ovirt.org/

NOTE: RedHat seem to make the open source page look ugly and dated on purpose. Don't let it fool you. I speculate this is because RHV has traditionally been a _very_ thin skin over the top of Ovirt.

Over the past several years, though, they seem to have significantly added value to their downstream RHV by merging with OpenShift to create Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as the primary value-add on top of Ovirt. But I've only used Ovirt since anything requiring me to test OpenShift necessitated licensing and therefore not-my-own-resources for proper reproduction and testing scenarios. One might check out how well OKD integrates with Ovirt, though, if they want a similar experience to OpenShift at home without the price tag.

If you want to have Linux virtualization and clustering, take a look at oVirt - https://www.ovirt.org/ (no native containers support there) or OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/ or OpenShift/OKD (https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift / https://www.okd.io/)

OVirt (the free version of RHEV) https://www.ovirt.org/ fits the bill for enterprisey environments

And there other choices as well (apart from Proxmox). For example ovirt. I ran a cluster of 14 with SAN using oVirt for many years. Very full featured.

Anyone have any experience with oVirt ?: https://www.ovirt.org/

It is another option that works. For a more scalable option loot at ovirt.

Or you can go open-source at varying levels of simplicity, from Proxmox to oVirt (probably closest to vSphere) to OpenStack.

Add oVirt Node 4.5-pre section #2787

Triton DataCenter (https://www.tritondatacenter.com) is something you might want to look into. Scaling to over 200 physical hosts is well supported in a single cluster. Triton is open source, multi-tenant, has full REST API (and commandline tooling), seperate admin and end user portal to name a few features.

Check out Triton DataCenter https://www.tritondatacenter.com — open source, and easy to manage, install and operate.

Setup Triton DataCenter or install SmartOS and build yourself a private cloud!

Triton DataCenter is a great alternative to OpenStack, and is also open source. Implementation of Triton is relatively easy, and ongoing maintenance is minimal. At mnx.io, we have operated our public cloud on Triton since ~2019.

Triton DataCenter[1] is open source[2], and has commercial revenue in excess of $1M ARR. We were fortunate to acquire this product from Joyent earlier this year[3], and are now well on our way to the next revenue target.

Triton was built on the backs of giants -- so a slightly different scenario than most.. But it is clear that customers will pay for open source products, and you can more than pay your rent one day!

[1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com

[2]: https://github.com/tritondatacenter

[3]: https://www.mnxsolutions.com/triton-faq

https://mnx.io -- We recently acquired Joyent Triton DataCenter[0,1,2] and commercial business, and are expanding our datacenter footprint this year.

Triton is open source[3], so you can run it in your own facility, at home, and our Public Cloud with the same experience.

[0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com