Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

darkerosxx

Anyone have experience using the KVM version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (the latest one)?

I'm about to make a serious attempt at using this and it appears it has all the great features of VMware, minus a few big ones like site recovery manager and a P2V converter (I mean really, wtf, no P2V?).

There are some big standout problems already, like having to install the Manager (Vcenter comparable) on Windows Server 2008 R2. Can't even install the manager on your own OS? The other, which I've already mentioned, is no P2V. I know they're working with immature software, but come on. This is big, get your engineers on it.

Anyways, if anyone else is working with it or has in the past, I'd love to hear your stories/thoughts/concerns.

darkerosxx

Scratch this. I thought RHEV was free with the OS, but you have to purchase it separately. Nothx.

sidsanders

kvm has some work to do for sure... we have it in test and it works ok. sun vbox i like better compared to kvm

darkerosxx

sidsanders wrote: »

kvm has some work to do for sure... we have it in test and it works ok. sun vbox i like better compared to kvm

Red Hat's implementation of KVM looks pretty badass. I just can't justify the cost of it, though I can tell it's way cheaper than VMware and only lacks a few of the important features.

NightShade03

Technically KVM is suppose to be RHEL 6's big "feature" so I'd wait either way until RHEL 6 has been out 6 months or so before moving over to it at all (if the cost justification arg ever changed that is).

I'm pretty pissed that Red Hat's release cycle is as long as it is and they can't seem to keep up with alot of the good features in other distros

darkerosxx

NightShade03 wrote: »

Technically KVM is suppose to be RHEL 6's big "feature" so I'd wait either way until RHEL 6 has been out 6 months or so before moving over to it at all (if the cost justification arg ever changed that is).

I'm pretty pissed that Red Hat's release cycle is as long as it is and they can't seem to keep up with alot of the good features in other distros

Yeah, but none of the good stuff is coming with that. The beta's out. The features available in their RHEV offering you have to buy a separate entitlement for. The packages aren't available otherwise.

Clarification: they have KVM available in their RHEV hypervisor offering. The RHEV Manager looks awesome. Just sucks you have to buy a separate entitlement beginning approx $2500.

Chris:/*

darkerosxx wrote: »

Yeah, but none of the good stuff is coming with that. The beta's out. The features available in their RHEV offering you have to buy a separate entitlement for. The packages aren't available otherwise.

Clarification: they have KVM available in their RHEV hypervisor offering. The RHEV Manager looks awesome. Just sucks you have to buy a separate entitlement beginning approx $2500.

RHEV is about 5 years behind VMware not just in features but also with its ability to handle load. RHEV dumped Xen to work on this new product and as it was stated above it was it is supposed to be a major feature of RHEL 6. This product is faster than Windows Hyper-V but it is still slower than VMware bare metal at least with testing on RHEL 5.4 when we did testing.

Windows and Red Hat are at about the same five year lag time compared to VMware but they are working quickly to catch up. If you want to compare price point the RHEV is less expensive than VMware and Windows but I found its configuration less intuitive than VMware. That has been our experience with testing the comparable V-systems.

Cheers

darkerosxx

Chris:/* wrote: »

RHEV is about 5 years behind VMware not just in features but also with its ability to handle load. RHEV dumped Xen to work on this new product and as it was stated above it was it is supposed to be a major feature of RHEL 6. This product is faster than Windows Hyper-V but it is still slower than VMware bare metal at least with testing on RHEL 5.4 when we did testing.

Windows and Red Hat are at about the same five year lag time compared to VMware but they are working quickly to catch up. If you want to compare price point the RHEV is less expensive than VMware and Windows but I found its configuration less intuitive than VMware. That has been our experience with testing the comparable V-systems.

Cheers

I agree. Gotta give RH a break, though, considering they don't *just* do Virtualization AND they just jumped onto a new hypervisor. IMO, they're at an advantage considering they can steal VMware's code like VMware stole theirs. Just look at the RHEV Manager compared to Vcenter.

BTW, are you sure you're testing RHEV and not just the virtualization available in RHEL5.4/5.5/RHEL6 beta? It's far different.

Chris:/*

darkerosxx wrote: »

I agree. Gotta give RH a break, though, considering they don't *just* do Virtualization AND they just jumped onto a new hypervisor. IMO, they're at an advantage considering they can steal VMware's code like VMware stole theirs. Just look at the RHEV Manager compared to Vcenter.

BTW, are you sure you're testing RHEV and not just the virtualization available in RHEL5.4/5.5/RHEL6 beta? It's far different.

RHEL Virtualization Beta -> RHEV

We got to test many of the features of RHEV in 5.4 again we have to wait for the release of RHEL 6 to tell if it is worth it right now. RHEL 6 keeps getting delayed due to RHEV not being quite what it needs to be.

You cannot really say VMware stole their code seeing as Red Hat has to release their open source code as part of the GNU. In addition ESX will be going away and ESXi will be the future of VMware so there will be no Linux CLI anymore.

Red Hat has no choice but to get in the Virtualization game. OS or software companies need to get on this band wagon or they will be quickly left behind.

darkerosxx

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, the RHEV 5.5 looks nothing like the Virtualization software included with the RHEL 6 Beta.

darkerosxx

I'm getting evaluation copies of RHEV. Going to try this puppy out and see what it can do.

Hyper-Me

Don't think id worry with it when you have products like ESXi out there. Even Hyper-V seems to trump KVMs feature list, etc. (queue the barrage of rocks and tomatoes)

earweed

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Don't think id worry with it when you have products like ESXi out there. Even Hyper-V seems to trump KVMs feature list, etc. (queue the barrage of rocks and tomatoes)

lol...you like the negative attention, don't you?

Hyper-Me

earweed wrote: »

lol...you like the negative attention, don't you?

I like Hyper-V, i think its a good product. Some poeple don't like to accept that there is room for more than 1 application in a given market. I'm not even saying that Hyper-V is better, just that its perfectly acceptable in certain scenarios.

darkerosxx

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Don't think id worry with it when you have products like ESXi out there. Even Hyper-V seems to trump KVMs feature list, etc. (queue the barrage of rocks and tomatoes)

It's really only missing a few major features from VMware, like I mentioned earlier... P2V and Site Recovery Manager.

redhat.com | Features & Benefits

earweed

Hyper-Me wrote: »

I like Hyper-V, i think its a good product. Some poeple don't like to accept that there is room for more than 1 application in a given market. I'm not even saying that Hyper-V is better, just that its perfectly acceptable in certain scenarios.

I like Hyper-V too. I had a little steep learning curve when I first started working with it but it's getting easier. It's all I've been using for labbing stuff for my 70-643 since I installed it.

Bl8ckr0uter

darkerosxx wrote: »

It's really only missing a few major features from VMware, like I mentioned earlier... P2V and Site Recovery Manager.

redhat.com | Features & Benefits

I didn't see on their site where you could download it. Do you have to pay for it?

darkerosxx

Yeah, I had to beg and plead for evaluation licenses.

Side note: I do use Hyper-v in my lab.

NightShade03

darkerosxx wrote: »

Side note: I do use Hyper-v in my lab.

That's it...return your RHCE right now...lol

earweed

darkerosxx wrote: »

Side note: I do use Hyper-v in my lab.

Good to hear. Since I've started using Hyper-V i definitely see that it does have some advantages. I'm still going to switch back to VMWare after I finish the MCITP just so I can learn some more new stuff.
I'm not sure what direction I'm gonna go after the MCITP be it Virtualization (VMWare) or Linux or even Cisco but I actually want to learn all 3.

darkerosxx

NightShade03 wrote: »

That's it...return your RHCE right now...lol

I know right... but it's only cause I get free licenses and I use it to test out Microsoft implementations for my side business.

darkerosxx

I've gotten my evaluations. I've installed RHEV-Manager and RHEV-Hypervisor on two blades.

I've already run into issues before I've even gotten everything installed and set up properly. The RHEV-M install adds a firewall exception for itself in Server 2008 R2; however, when installing RHEV-H and connecting it to RHEV-M, they are unable to communicate. Turn off Windows firewall and they are able to communicate. I called Red Hat and got the ports used for RHEV-M/H communication, which are:

22, 80, 443, 5634, 5534-6166, 8006-8009, 49152, 49216, 54321

I added these ports in a new rule for outbound and inbound, but got the same result. Opened a ticket with RH engineering, but I can't be the first person to find this...

Another issue I found was with iDRAC cards for Dell's M1000E Blade Chassis and M605 blades. The current version of RHEV-M asks for DRAC5, which apparently is not the same as iDRAC, because it's not able to communicate with my iDRAC interface for power management of my hosts. Also opened a ticket with RH engineering.

I'm thinking I'll start a blog so I can track my thoughts/issues and offer them up to others as I work through my setup.

darkerosxx

I posted this in the Linux forums, but I've enrolled in the Red Hat Virtualization course, which prepares you for running RHEV-M/H and the Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator certification exam. I'll be taking it in October.

darkerosxx

darkerosxx wrote: »

Another issue I found was with iDRAC cards for Dell's M1000E Blade Chassis and M605 blades. The current version of RHEV-M asks for DRAC5, which apparently is not the same as iDRAC, because it's not able to communicate with my iDRAC interface for power management of my hosts. Also opened a ticket with RH engineering.

I found that changing drac5 to ipmilan in the drop-down box has successful results for power management of iDRAC cards. Reporting this to RH.

darkerosxx

Now I can't even add iSCSI storage... grrr... opened a new ticket.

Bl8ckr0uter

I'd be interested in a blog

darkerosxx

iSCSI automatically uses its initiator name of:

iqn.1994-05.com.redhat:da7ef2e86450

So have to specify this specific one (maybe with a different code on the end?) in your iscsi device.

darkerosxx

Was given these commands to enter on the Windows server to open the firewall for RHEV-M:

c:\> for /D %p in (80,443,25285,54321,22,8006,8007,8008,8009) do (netsh
firewall add portopening protocol = TCP port = %p name = RHEVM%p)
c:\> netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 enable

darkerosxx

Just got the RHCVA cert and I'm going to have more time to work on this soon, so I'll be posting a good bit more.

In the meantime, if anyone else is working on RHEV, discuss so we can share experiences!

darkerosxx

Got this all working and so far I can say I enjoy working with it a bit more than Hyper-V at the moment, mostly because in some cases it's a bit more intuitive than Hyper-V as far as disks, setting up a new guest, and making storage available for your "datacenter".

The cost for setting up a single host is pretty similar, as well.

My opinion thus far is really that vmware will be at the top permanently and rhev/hyper-v will be competing for the second place spot. Use vmware for your extreme high priority systems and rhev/hyper-v where you can trade HA percentages for cost savings.