[rhelv6-beta-list] RHEV v. RHEL+KVM -- WAS: My first experiences with RHEL6 beta

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday, June 17, 2010 05:55:15 am Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
> > I'm actually looking more towards the 'replace VMware
> > {ESX|VI3|vSphere} with RHEL6 plus KVM' crowd ...

> Understand:  
>   VMware ESXi/vSphere             !~   RHEL6 + KVM  

Oh, I know that.  But the fact that you needed to clarify illustrates that it is a common idea out there, and everybody these days is looking to save as much opex (subscriptions/maintenance count as opex, of course) as possible.

And that's still the direction I'm looking at going, instead of the RHEV route, at least at the moment, and I'm aware of the difference.  

Primarily I want to completely eliminate the Windows requirement for the management server.  But, honestly, I can count on one finger the times I've used some of the more advanced management features; the most common use is for the VM's console, for storage reconfiguration, and for VM provisioning.  YMMV, of course, and vMotion/HA is a wonderful thing in larger deployments than mine, especially with blades.  But my use case is fairly simple, and I'm using other HA failover mechanisms due to the failover architecture not being vMotion/HA friendly (it's over a WAN with no shared SAN).  So a RHEL+KVM solution would be a good fit for me at this point in time, even if feature parity with VMware's vSphere isn't there.

> Because people make the statement that RHEL6 + KVM is a VMware
> ESX Server / vSphere replacement, customers assume Red Hat doesn't
> offer management, and only ships a platform-integrated hypervisor,
> based on what RHEL6 + KVM is.

I'm not making that assumption, but some might, yes.  I would hope most people on this list could see the distinction without my pointing it out.

> RHEV-H with RHEV-* modules is designed to be the direct competitor
> of VMware ESXi + vSphere, at a greatly reduced price.  
[snip]
> It's the management that makes all the difference, from simply a
> "platform-integrated" HV like Xen, KVM or the "install atop of host"
> VMware Workstation and Server products.

Later VMware Server is manageable (with plugins) by a Virtual Center server running on Win2003 or 2008 (or even XP) alongside ESX 3 hosts. There are of course limitations in how much you can do with the non-ESX hosts.