Introducing oVirt 4.2.0 Beta

On October 31st, the oVirt project released version 4.2.0 Beta, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

Since the release of oVirt 4.2.0 Alpha a month ago, a substantial number of stabilization fixes have been introduced.

What's new in this release?

Support for LLDP, a protocol for network devices for advertising identity and capabilities to neighbors on a LAN. LLDP information can now be displayed in both the UI and via the API. The information gathered by the protocol can be used for better network configuration.

oVirt 4.2.0 Beta features Gluster 3.12.

oVirt's hyperconverged solution now enables a single replica Gluster deployment.

OVN (Open Virtual Network) is now fully supported and recommended for isolated overlay networks. OVN is automatically deployed on the the host, and made available for VM connectivity.

Snapshots can now be uploaded and downloaded via the REST API (and the SDKs).

An improvement has been introduced to the self-hosted engine. Now, the self-hosted-engine will connect to all IPs discovered, allowing both higher performance via multiple paths as well as high availability in the event that one of the targets fails.

A new Continue reading

Introducing High Performance Virtual Machines

Bringing high performance virtual machines to oVirt!

Introducing a new VM type in oVirt 4.2.0 Alpha. A newly added checkbox in the all-new Administration Portal delivers the highest possible virtual machine performance, very close to bare metal.

What does it do?

Some of the magic includes:

• Enable Pass-Through Host CPU
• Enable IO Threads, Num Of IO Threads = 1
• Set the IO and Emulator threads pinning topology

For the full feature set, see the very detailed High Performance VM feature page

Count me in! How do I set it up?

Simple. Go to the Administration Portal and from the vertical menu select Compute > Virtual machines. Click the New VM tab to open up the New Virtual Machine dialog box. In the General tab next to the Optimized for field, click the drop down menu and select High Performance. Click OK. Depending on your current configurations, a smart pop-up may open with a list of additional recommended manual configurations, specific to your setup. To address these recommended changes, click Cancel.

New Virtual Machine dialog box with the High Performance VM type highlighted

Introducing oVirt 4.2.0 Alpha

On September 28, the oVirt project released version 4.2.0 Alpha, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

This pre-release version should not be used in production, and is not feature complete.

oVirt is the open source virtualization solution that provides an awesome KVM management interface for multi-node virtualization. This maintenance version is super stable and there are some nice new features.

what's new in oVirt 4.2.0?

Here's an overview of the new main features:

The Administration Portal has been redesigned from scratch using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes consistency and usability across IT applications, through UX patterns and widgets. The result is a cleaner, more intuitive and user-friendly user interface. The old horizontal menu has been replaced by a two-level vertical menu. The system tree is gone, and its functionality has been integrated into the vertical menus. Here are some screenshots:

Dashboard

Virtual Machines View

Adding a New Virtual Machine

Storage View

An all new VM Portal for non-admin users - designed with React-based UI and Patternfly principles - replaces the existing User Portal. Built with performance and ease of use in mind, Continue reading

A Warm Welcome to the Summer Internship Students

The oVirt project is glad to announce that five talented students will be joining the oVirt community over the summer period, as part of the 2017 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy internship programs.

Both GSoC and Outreachy focus on getting more student developers interested in open source software development, as well as providing opportunities for talented people, underrepresented in the tech world, to gain valuable technology experience. The students will spend their summer break writing code, learning about open source development and documentation, and earning a stipend.

Joining us as part of GSoC are:

Tasdik Rahman will be working on adding Ansible roles for oVirt-utilities, for easier testing and automated redeployment. His mentor will be Lukas Svaty.

Shubham Dubey will be working on configuring backup storage for Ovirt. The idea is to replace the need for a dedicated storage domain for backup and disaster recovery. Shubham's mentor will be Maor Lipchuk.

Joining us as part of Outreachy, are:

Anastasia Antsiferova will be working on the oVirt log analyser. Her mentor will be Milan Zamazal.

Leni Kadali will be working on documetation. His mentor will be Jason Brooks.

Valentina Makarova will be working on implementing oVirt integration tests using Continue reading

Say Hello to oVirt 4.1.1

On March 22, the oVirt project released version 4.1.1, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, CentOS Linux 7.3, or similar.

oVirt is the open source virtualization solution that provides an awesome KVM management interface for multi-node virtualization. This maintenance version is super stable and there are some nice new features.

So what's new in oVirt 4.1.1?

Storage Team

• LUNs can be removed from a block data domain, provided that there is enough free space on the other domain devices to contain the data stored on the LUNs being removed.
• Support for NFS version 4.2 connections (when supported by storage).

Integration Team

• oVirt-hosted-engine-setup now works with NetworkManager enabled.

Network Team

• NetworkManager keeps running when a host is added to oVirt. This allows users to review networking configurations in cockpit whenever they want.

Infra Team

• A new tool, engine-vacuum, performs a vacuum on the PostgreSQL database in order to reclaim disk space on the operating system. It also updates and removes garbage from tables.
• Alerts for all data centers and clusters that are not upgraded to the highest compatibility version.
• Time zones are now shown in log records to make it easier to correlate Continue reading