oVirt 3.4 Means Management, VMs Can Live On the Same Machine 51
darthcamaro (735685) writes "Red Hat's open source oVirt project hit a major milestone this week with the release of version 3.4. It's got improved storage handling so users can mix and match different resource types, though the big new feature is one that seems painfully obvious. For the first time oVirt users can have the oVirt Manager and oVirt VMs on the same physical machine. 'So, typically, customers deployed the oVirt engine on a physical machine or on a virtual machine that wasn't managed or monitored,' Scott Herold, principal product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization said. 'The oVirt 3.4 release adds the ability for oVirt to self-host its engine, including monitoring and recovery of the virtual machine.'"
(Wikipedia describes oVirt as "a free platform virtualization management web application community project.")
Still trying to wrap my head... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're running an operating system, so that you can run a software package, so that you can run another operating system, so that you can run another software package that is then interfaced-to by users or other stations on the network?
I guess that I can see it for boxes that serve multiple, different paying subscribers that each get their own "box", but wouldn't it just make more sense to size the applications to use the host OS on a single box as opposed to running multiple copies of operating systems and services that eat resources when the virtual hosts all belong to a single customer?
Re:Still trying to wrap my head... (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who uses KVM VMs, I see a number of advantages:
1. More efficient use of resources. A dedicated server usually idles a lot, and those cycles do nothing. Running guests allows empty cycles to be put to work.
2. Load balancing and moving resources around is a lot easier. Have a busy host, move a guest to an idle one.
3. Hardware abstraction. This is the big one for me. Guests are no longer tied to specific hardware, and I can build a new VM host and move guests to it a helluva lot more painlessly than I could with an OS installed directly on hardware.
4. Backup options. Coupled with functionality like logical volumes, I can make snapshots for backup or testing purposes with incredible ease.