oVirt VS Packer

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

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.

I'll give you hard, but rewarding and easy to modify(once you know what you're doing) way. Packer may be a thing you're looking for.

It is straightforward to build them with packer (I have built AMIs for 13.0 and 13.1, but 13.2 should be exactly the same). I've been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while, but have not gotten to it yet... In any case, what I am doing is using the EBS Surrogate Builder to start an instance running the official FreeBSD 13.2 image with an extra volume attached and run a script to create a zpool on the extra volume and bootstrap and configure FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE on it. After that packer takes care of creating an AMI out of that extra volume, so you can use it... If you have any issues, let me know, and maybe I will finally get to writing that blog post...

HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

Seems related to https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/12118 But the workaround discribed in the comments doesn’t seems to work anymore

I'd suggest using a tool like Packer to build a gold image based on your base AMI and all your changes. Then you'll have your own AMI you can launch new instances with.

Your assumption sounds correct. It sounds like you shouldn't focus on migrating specific instances, but instead migrating the template image used for autoscaling into GCP. I tend to prefer Packer for this job, or otherwise recreating the golden image directly on GCP.