this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Yeah we did a pretty thorough review this year in the hopes of ditching VMware... Landscape is pretty bleak tbh
Only one I would maybe like to give a PoC would be nutanix. unfortunately red hat virt is being deprecated soon, to be replaced by ovirt which is def not prod ready
Not exactly. oVirt is the upstream open source project that Red Hat Virtualization was based on. It is never and will never be "production ready." Because they don't sell support for it.
Red Hat does not have a replacement for RHV. You can use OpenShift Virtualization to make virtual machines, but it's not designed to be a replacement for RHV or a competitor to VMware. It is designed to be a stepping stone for people looking to containerize their workloads or keep that one legacy app around that can't be containerized. You might be better served by OpenStack, but that's an entire cloud orchestration tool, and the next version will require OpenShift to host the control plane.
Nutanix is probably the best competitor to VMware. Proxmox is another solution that would be great for small to medium businesses. SUSE's Rancher team is working on Harvester, which could become something that competes. Honestly, there isn't a lot of competition in this market because it's not where growth is. People are moving to containers and kubernetes. Even VMware knows it and they are playing catch up with Tanzu.
Source: I'm a consultant for Red Hat.
Well our red hat account manager said OpenShift virtualisation (what I meant by ovirt and why I included it with Red hat) was their replacement for RHV.
They did also say all the rest though. That said in NA there are a couple of huge esxi to OpenShift virtualisation migrations we have white papers about. Our testing just found too many missing features compared to vmwares offerings
Well, they're wrong. It has been clearly communicated that OpenShift Virt is not a replacement for RHV. It does not do the enterprise things like having concepts of dataceners, etc... It is to help people migrate to containerization.
That's just sales being sales. Just because you can use a hammer to drive a screw doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job. Which is clearly the conclusion you already came to.
Sadly oVirt has also reached EOL it seems. There hasnt been an update for it for eternities. oVirt is actually pretty nice in some aspects but yeah it has some weird bugs. Running a prod environment though is actually possible if you have enough hypervisor in a cluster then even patching runs quite smoothly. Autobalancing also works nice.
The only thing I haaateee about it is the awful one-time consoles.
The fact that Windows Server .iso's dont have the needed drivers to recognise a virtual drive is also not the best for a productive environment with many windows servers. Its possible, yes. But it brings a little headache at the beginning of setting everything up with it. After all you only need to mount em manually a few times. Only so many times, as you create a fresh VM-template for your environment. After that it isnt any hassle anymore.
I'm not saying you can't run production on it, after all RHV was based on it. What I'm saying is that it's a run at your own risk because you can't buy support. Some companies are okay with taking on that risk, others aren't.
You should be automating that stuff anyway. Make a template that has the drivers installed, or write up some Ansible that does the install for you. It's annoying, but it shouldn't be a problem once you have an automation pipeline in place.
Argh good god. Ansible. Another topic that I wanted to dive in recently. It seems to be more and more used in all kinds of environments. Gotta get my fingers on it and get to know my way around in it.
Ansible is my specialty. It's kind of hard to get in the mindset of declarative after all the years of writing imperative scripts. Once you do, it's amazing.