[ale] Recommendations for my next distro?

[Damon L. Chesser]

OpenStack is not in competition with VMware.  OPenStack != VMware. They 
do share some common ground, overlap if you will, but don't share the 
same space in it's entirety. That misconception causes  me no shortage 
of pain at my job.

Ovirt/RHEV = VMware

and I do run RHEV at work.  It is quite nice and feature-full, though it 
is not enterprise ready.  What that means is, it does not cost enough to 
be worthy of using in the enterprise.  We will not even bring up the 
cost of Ovirt, which is $0 per server, because, as we all know, there is 
no such thing as software that costs $0, is there?  And everytime I 
bring it up, I lose credibility, seriously.


Jim what do you mean "PluscI can lock down user access with FreeIPA 
:-)"  ?  What is this Pluscl?


On 03/01/2015 09:44 AM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> Nice comparison, thanks!
>
> The use of all that java in Redhat enterprise solutions really bothers me.
> OTOH, FreeIPA has me really jealous.  For things that should be cross platform,
> seems odd they won't run on Debian. Might as well stay with AD.
>
> I expect that virt-manager would get cumbersome with more than 20 physical
> systems and 100+ VMs or so. I like that different systems can provide different
> permissions, but dislike that if you can admin 1 VM on the physical server, then
> you can admin them all.
>
> The VMware enterprise stuff is nice (it should be for those costs!!!!) - mainly
> because of the migration from release to release isn't usually painful like it
> is with openstack (so I hear). Migrations in openstack are .... non-existent.
> Basically, you have to build a fresh infra for a new openstack. Seems like folks
> would setup a migration hop technique.
>
> On 03/01/2015 09:00 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>> Ovirt is large. Very large. It's design is to directly challenge VMware. So,
>> yes, very large and designed to be deployed across multiple physical systems.
>>
>> My grouse with it is the vast amount of java it's written in. But that's all
>> only for the web GUI and it's linking to the back end.  The back end is all
>> libvirt :-)
>>
>> I've used it to setup some developers with the ability to generate a VM that's a
>> clone of an existing devel environment with (yuck) Oracle ready to go for very
>> specific testing needs then drop it in the trash. As I don't have control of the
>> network, I can only setup test VM s with private lan  networking which I do
>> control. Ovirt uses spice to provide a console, CLI or X, and the access is over
>> the single, public IP. PluscI can lock down user access with FreeIPA :-)
>>
>> Yeah, that is a security issue having that much java web code. But the entire
>> process is designed to run with full SELinux lock down. That does much to
>> mitigate the damage from a break in.
>>
>> Ovirt is NOT for desktop users to run a few VMs with. Virt-manager does that
>> very well. Ovirt's to run a large collection of VMs that's managed by multiple
>> admins across multiple servers with large-scale shared storage (NFS is default
>> but iSCSI from a SAN is preferred).
>>
>> On Mar 1, 2015 8:39 AM, "DJ-Pfulio" <djpfulio at jdpfu.com
>> <mailto:djpfulio at jdpfu.com>> wrote:
>>
>>      oVirt seems extremely bloated and complex or do I have that wrong?  Plus it is
>>      Redhat-only and uses a website for administration. Running a web server has
>>      always seemed the opposite of secure to me, but if you plan to work in a redhat
>>      shop, then using this makes 100% sense.
>>
>>      libvirt + virt-manager is lite/easy in comparison. This method works for any
>>      Linux hostOS (major distros) and takes less than 5 min to install/configure for
>>      your skill level. You can run a normal desktop on the same machine with
>>      virt-manager or remotely access any libvirt hypervisor system securely - that is
>>      built-in and uses ssh (password or key-based).  virt-manager is like the
>>      virtualbox or VMware player/workstation GUI, so if you've seen those, you'll be
>>      fine.
>>
>>      Both can use KVM, LXC, Xen, and a few others (that won't be named) and can run
>>      any OS you like (almost). Some people have OS/2 v4 running inside a VM, if
>>      that's your desire. ;)
>>
>>      Or .... if you want web admin, take a look at proxmox. It is very mature and
>>      provides KVM and openvz containers. OTOH, it takes over the physical machine
>>      completely. Don't think you can run a desktop on the host. Lots of places have
>>      been running proxmox servers quietly for years.
>>
>>      On 03/01/2015 08:20 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>>      > Look at Fedora or CentOS and play with Ovirt and FreeIPA. Those two
>>      > projects have a GUI yet the CLI behind the scenes is massively powerful.
>>      >
>>      > Fedora 21 has a server version and CentOS 7 has a desktop version.
>>      >
>>      > Then there's the docker minimalist version of each that's all CLI.
>>      >
>>      > If you have the hardware for virtualization, load Ovirt as a standalone on
>>      > CentOS 7 and load up a zillion VMs to test/play with. Then you can test
>>      > every distro!
>>
>

-- 
Damon at damtek.com
404-271-8699