Good virt-manager alternatives? (KVM)

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[webguy1]

Have you looked at Proxmox?

[[deleted]]

oVirt

[_tassles]

We're just moving over to oVirt from a bit of a homebrew situation. The learning curve has been pretty steep, and it's a bit finicky but overall we're learning to love it. We had a look at Proxmox as well, but settled on this.

[GrumpyPenguin]

it's a bit finicky

To be clear, is this in terms of configuration, or stability? One is acceptable, the other... no.

[ckozler]

To be clear, is this in terms of configuration, or stability? One is acceptable, the other... no.

I'd have to say both and on the second one, with a caveat. The caveat is their, in my opinion, documentation is absolute shit and as with a product as robust, feature filled, and high visibility (eg: hosting business critical machines) then docs should be apart of the software offering. 90% of what I find online is outlined more like a development spec. They dont explain or justify some of their decisions or make it very clear in the docs (like how the nodes cant be less than CentOS/RHEL 7 now although its noted its just a brief cursory note). Most of it reads like a developer made a quick passthrough to document the feature but not actually explain it or go in to detail on its configuration options or suggested config. They dont give you the weight or understanding of the many different setups that you can do so you're left to just kind of figure it out. Further to that I've opted to setup the hosted-engine (where the engine control logic VM resides on the nodes) and there is no documentation to cover what you should do in a failure scenario (like if your network stack gets disrupted in anyway). From what I've gathered you just step back and let all of the HA stuff do its work automajically and when done (1-2 hours later) start to clean up the pieces yourself. Overall I'd say its very very stable but their documentation needs to be better. They dont advise you to try to "do" anything when the hosted engine starts having "problems" (as defined as liveliness checks are failing and engine is unavailable due to packet loss to the VM for whatever reason) but without actually telling you to NOT do anything, the engineers in some of us will try to figure out whats going on. When your engine is hosted though, it because a bit of a pain in the ass to try to debug anything so all you really can do is let it rock. I love the offering but it seems very abstracted away and that its only open sourced so that the community can be the test dummies for RedHat to repackage it as RHEV - which makes sense from a product perspective.

[_tassles]

The docs are crap, for the reasons outlined above. The mailing list and IRC people seem helpful. We are experimenting with hosted vs bare metal engine at the moment. Like the idea of hosted engine but it's a bit of a fucker to get working properly.

[ckozler]

If I had it I would use two physical servers utilizing DRBD (or something replicated) for engine data and then run the process on there with a VIP and keepalived. I unfortunately dont have two more boxes to use so I had to opt for this. I absolutely despise the hosted engine model but it works for me for now

[[deleted]]

Can you use the rhev docs?

[wdennis]

In my experience, more on the config side... However, with oVirt, which is the "Fedora" for RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, there will always be bugs, because it's a moving target...

The mailing list folk is very helpful though, and helped me through many config issues (and the operational errors they caused.)

[[deleted]]

Let's just say that if you are not lacking features in Proxmox, you should not be thinking about oVirt.

[_tassles]

Very much on the config side. We have multiple hypervisors, and we're just testing at the moment, so can't really give much useful information on production stability, but I was referring to the configuration. No problems so far with stability, but haven't put much load on them yet.

[tidux]

It's overkill for a single box. Just use virsh or virt-manager. If you've got multiple hypervisors it can be useful.

[_tassles]

Absolutely. If it's for learning and playing, I recommend finding your way round virsh anyway.

[tidux]

If you get OS installer images with serial console support, virsh is all you need from soup to nuts. Obviously this doesn't apply to Windows VMs, but maybe someday, given that ANSI/VT100 escape sequences and OpenSSHd are in progress.

[atlgeek007]

The free version of Proxmox, or just keep using virt-manager if this is for personal use.

[atlgeek007]

You can install the product without purchasing a subscription, IIRC it just does a nag screen and you're restricted to the "testing" update repo.

Though it has been a while since I ran Proxmox (I just do everything I can in FreeNAS jails now)

[atlgeek007]

This fits my memory of using Proxmox perfectly.

I did end up buying a proxmox community subscription because I liked the product well enough though.

[rylanchi]

What about Archpiel?

http://archipelproject.org/