oVirt VS Nomad

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

I don't have any further insight, but looking at <https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page...> coughed up https://github.com/atlassian/nomad/branches although confusingly it says "updated last week" but browsing any one of the branches seems to be stupid old so I got nothing

Finding conceptual forks, e.g. $(git push --mirror ...) would be trickier but I bet sourcegraph could do it

Ultimately, the question boils down to: what risk are you driving down: hitching your wagon to a dead stack, not getting security updates, not getting PRs merged, $other?

In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference.

Nomad is really awesome!

I only heard of this today, but it looks really interesting. It seems to finally get Kubernetes a bit closer to something like https://www.nomadproject.io/ in terms of complexity to install and operate.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of container orchestration and management, two prominent players have emerged: Kubernetes and HashiCorp's Nomad. While Kubernetes has gained widespread adoption and popularity, Nomad provides a compelling alternative that stands out for its simplicity and efficiency. In this blog post, we'll explore the advantages of using Nomad over Kubernetes and why it might be the right choice for certain use cases.

I can't discern how many are just those "dependabot" bumps but the 1400 forks show some are active https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page... including CircleCI who I would think have a stake in a libre Nomad https://github.com/circleci/nomad/tree/circleci/release-1.5....

Now maybe their goals don't align with the community, and/or they don't want to be in the maintainer business for such a project, but better than nothing

Could this be a solution? nomad

It worth noting that Nomad UI(a official web admin panel) has log tailing utility built-in so maybe partial work has already been done. The developers may have other concerns.

The related issue is https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/10220

While I do understand the reasoning in their FAQ on the subject (https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq). I however failed to noticed those intentions in their license text (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/commit/b3e30b1dfa185d9437...).

Specifically the part in FAQ which says "internal production use is fine", but then license says that "non-production use only" and then "You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products.".

IANAL, but even to me this statement is full loopholes. WHO do we consider 3rd party? WHAT do we consider "hosted or embedded basis"? WHEN do we consider it "competitive with Hashicorps products"?