oVirt Alternatives

oVirt reviews and mentions

• oVirt: Free open-source virtualization solution for your entire enterprise
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2024
• Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2024

  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.

• Need help setting up a cluster
  1 project | /r/homelab | 25 May 2023

  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/)

• VMware alternatives for a big environment (Hyper-V, Proxmox, KVM, Nutanix, Citrix?)
  2 projects | /r/sysadmin | 22 Mar 2023

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

• Proxmox vs ESXI
  1 project | /r/homelab | 31 Jan 2023

  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.

• Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS Kurulumu
  1 project | dev.to | 12 Dec 2022
• VMware Alternatives?
  7 projects | /r/sysadmin | 12 Oct 2022

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

• Alternatives to ESXi?
  1 project | /r/homelab | 26 Aug 2022

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

• Broadcom to 'focus on rapid transition to subscriptions' for VMware
  2 projects | /r/sysadmin | 27 May 2022

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

• Thanks to the oVirt 4.5.0 Alpha test day participants!
  1 project | /r/ovirt | 17 Mar 2022

  Add oVirt Node 4.5-pre section #2787

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  www.influxdata.com | 10 May 2024

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