RHV vs OpenShift Virtualization

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

RHV is a good choice for organizations that need a traditional virtualization platform with a lot of features and flexibility. It supports a wide range of hypervisors, including KVM, VMware, and Xen. It also supports a wide range of workloads, including virtual machines, containers, and bare metal.

OpenShift Virtualization is a good choice for organizations that are looking for a platform that is specifically designed for containerized workloads. It is built on top of Kubernetes, which is the most popular container orchestration platform. It also integrates with other Red Hat products, such as OpenShift Pipelines and OpenShift Service Mesh.

OpenShift Virtualization allows you to leverage existing VM investments while moving towards a cloud-native future. It delivers a consistent, efficient, and secure platform for deploying both traditional and next-generation applications, helping you future-proof your virtualization strategy.

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/rhev 

Refer OpenShift Virtualization here : https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization 

Courses to refer RHV : RH318 : https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/rh318-red-hat-virtualization  with exam EX318.

OpenShift virtualization : DO316 : https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/do316-managing-virtual-machines-red-hat-openshift-virtua...  with exam EX316.

[diac]

Hey everyone.

I have been a RHV user for a few years now and I was pretty happy with it.
When I heard RH was killing RHV in favor of Openshift Virtualization...
Let's just just say I was more than a little bit ticked off.

With RHV you could build simple, relatively low cost, functional and highly performing virtualization environments with nothing more than a couple of bare metal servers and a NAS.
Implementing the same solution with Openshift Virtualization is a whole other ballgame, minimum 3 nodes, way more expensive and quite a lot more complicated.

RHV was ideal for small to mid sized companies that had no need to invest heavily in container infrastructure.
And yes, such relics will continue to exist.
Now that RHV is gone I'm starting to see customers move to Oracle Linux Virtualization, based on ovirt.

And then there is performance.
I must admit I was a bit shocked when I read this report by Principled Technologies.
https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Vmware/vSphere-7U2-vs-Red-Hat-OpenShift-4-9-0322.pdf
Just do yourself a favor and browse through it...
I am very curious to know if RH has commented on the report or published a report to counter this one.

I'd love to get your take on RHV vs Openshift Virtualization.
In my mind these two solutions should have co-existed for years to come, to target a wider audience.

Best regards,
Sigurdur Bjornsson

[Fran_Garcia]

Red Hat had 4 virtualization solutions, and maintaing all 4 doesn't make sense technically or commercially:

- KVM on RHEL

- Red Hat Virtualization, based on oVirt

- Red Hat OpenStack

- Openshift Virtualization

For the smallest usecases (two servers), you can still use RHEL+KVM+Shared Storage (eg NFS). This set up is included by regular RHEL and supported with your regular subscription. You still have a (limited) Web UI as part of the latest RHEL9 developent in Cockpit / RHEL Web Console. This blog is a bit dated, but you can get a taste on how that would look like: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managing-virtual-machines-rhel-8-web-console

Re oVirt: Red Hat has been calling for community collaborators to help with development with the oVirt project for years, both before and after the RHV product announcement. Unfortunately those calls for actions have not been followed by any user/group of users/developers of other commercial distributions of oVirt. Red Hat's priority with this transition has been to ensure the community built around oVirt was left in a good place to continue the development. Unfortunately, it seems no one wanted to pick the torch. Anyhow, the oVirt project has all their development resources now in public infrastructure (Github and others), so if anyone wants to continue the development, they are able to do so. https://blogs.ovirt.org/2022/02/future-of-ovirt-february-2022/ 

Re the "study", "This project was commisioned by VMware". I don't think there's an official response to everything anybody says...

As for the future of on-prem virtualization: we can speculate as much as we want, specially if you take into account what other vendors are doing. IMHO some large on-prem customers will use virtualization; some will move to the cloud because it's still more efficient to do so, and many will start modernising their applications and benefit from a hybrid VM and Contianers platform. Openshift Virtualization can do both, well, and is being actively developed by a large community with multiple upstream collaborators, partners and users.

Cheers

Fran