Hi, First of all, thanks for sharing. It's always good to get feedback, especially when it's balanced and with specific examples and comparisons.
Secondly, I do believe you have touched on what I believe is a conceptual difference oVirt has, which translates to a gap in the experience you have described: when managing 2-3 hosts, it is more intuitive and easier to just configure each separately (and there's very little to configure anyway, and the number of hosts is low), then to configure on a higher level (in oVirt case, data center and cluster level) and apply - who needs either when you have 2-3 hosts, right? In a sense, the hyper-converged (gdeploy - see http://www.ovirt.org/blog/2017/04/up-and-running-with-ovirt-4-1-and-gluster-storage/ ) provides a good 'day 1' experience I believe - but is indeed limited to the hyper-converged deployment type. It'd be a good idea to expand it to the general case of 2-3 hosts, I reckon. Perhaps we need to go further and somehow hide both data center and cluster (for X hosts, where X is lower than... 5?) assuming you'd have only a single DC and a single cluster - and present their options as 'global'? Once you go above 5 hosts we'll expand the options and display the bigger hierarchy? We've had the idea of 'ovirt-lite' years ago, and it never really materialized - perhaps we should revisit it. I think it's easy technologically, a bit more challenging to get right the improved user experience. I can certainly see the use cases of both small labs, remote offices and proof-of-concept setups. As for the installation, I would really like to see: 1. Install an OS -or- install oVirt node 2. Go to http://<URL> 3. Installation wizard. This is exactly (again) what gdeploy provides, as well as hosted-engine - but we probably need to streamline further more and add regular engine setup to it. Thanks again, Y. On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 9:04 PM, Johannes Spanier <jospan...@web.de> wrote: > Hi oVirt community. > > I did a short series for tweets @jospanier judging my first time user > experience with several virtualization platforms and was asked by Sandro > Bonazzola to elaborate a bit further than what fits into 140 chars. > > I had a specific use case: The small-ish learning lab with only 2-3 nodes > and it needs to be free. I also wanted live migration to stay flexible with > my hosts. > > I currently use my lab for to run ~10 virtual CSR1000V routers on free > ESXi in addition to some real router hardware. I want to expand the lab to > be able to explore some other technologies as well like network automation, > SDN, infrastructure as code and the likes. > > The lineup for the PoC was oVirt, ESXi, Openstack and Proxmox VE. > > I my tweets I was referring to a) the install procedure and b) the > operational experience. > > Here is what I found. These findings are highly subjective and debatable. > I am aware of that. > > Both ESXi and Proxmox VE is trivial to install. You grab the ISO image, > use a tool like Rufus to make an bootable USB stick or use iLO virtual CD > functionality and off you go. Both installers do not ask many questions and > just do their job. After installation ESXi is all ready to run. Just open > the WebGui and start deploying your first node. With Proxmox VE you get a > TUI wizard guiding you though the last steps. After that the WebGui is > ready and you can deploy your first VM immediately. > > I found oVirt a bit more involved to install. You have to install the > Engine on one node and then register the other hosts with it. While that > process is easy to handle it is a bit more work. A big thing for me was > that at first glance there did no seem to be a "single node" install. My > fist impression was that I needed a minimum of two servers. Of course later > I learned about the Hosted Engine and the All-In-One install. > > Do not get me wrong. First time oVirt installation is still easy to handle > on a quiet afternoon. > > Openstack installation compared to that is a PITA nightmare. I tried both > RDO (TripleO) and Fuel for setup but gave up after two days for both, > confused about what I actually need to do for a start. Got some nodes > running with Fuel but was not satisfied. I then followed the Openstack > manual Install Guide. I have a day job, so it took me about 5 days to get > through the whole procedure, but a least I understood what was going on and > what I needed to do. > > So that was my "first day" experience with those. > Now for the "second day" i.e. operation. > > ESXi and Proxmox VE are both very simple to understand. You usually do not > need a manual to find you way around. Deploying a VM is a breeze. oVirt is > pretty simple to understand too. But you have to wrap your head around the > Data Center principle underpinning everything. Its just a bit more > complicated. On one or two occasions while playing around it was unclear at > first why my datacenter was offline and I had to consult the manual for > that. One can immediately feel that multi-tenancy is a big benefit of oVirt > that is not so obvious in ESXi and Proxmox. But it comes with the price of > added complexity. > > The new WebGui in the ESXi 6.5 I used is sloooow but some functions are > not available with the vSphere Client Tool any more. > Proxmox and oVirt WebGui are very responsive and "feel" way better. The > Openstack WebGui is also quite nice. > > If you want to build a private multi-teneant scale-out cloud OpenStack is > probably your best horse in the stable. But for my purpose it was just > overkill. The process of deploying a simple VM was the most work from all > four tools. > > Wrap-up > For the specific use-case (see above) Proxmox VE was the best fit for me, > closely followed by oVirt due to the more involved installation. ESXi comes > in lagging in third place as it does not offer live migration in the free > version and due to the poor WebGui experience I got. Also you have to pay > big bucks to get the same functionality as in the other three. Openstack is > placed at a distant fourth place for this use case. > > Hope that was interesting. Do reach out to me on twitter if you have any > further questions or suggestions. > > Regards > Johannes > _______________________________________________ > Users mailing list > Users@ovirt.org > http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users >
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