[mroche]

This is Reddit, so taking any claims with a severely hefty earth sized grain of salt..

> Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames.

> Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically.

As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments.

We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.

This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing/discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...

[sofixa]

> We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacemen

Didn't know RHEV was being killed. It makes sense, the enterprise virtualisation market is shrinking by the day, but it's still a bummer there's less competition. Is oVirt being maintained?

> That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.

Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.

[Datagenerator]

For LXC and VM's one might consider Proxmox as counterbalance to the VMware walled garden.

[zhdc1]

Second Proxmox. While our footprint is likely much smaller than many of the other folks on here, it's been a life saver for managing LXCs.

[doubled112]

Another Proxmox vote here, even if I'm also small scale.

Proxmox has been solid and near problem free for our simple deployment

As far as Linux system containers go, is the landscape still raw LXC, LXD, and Proxmox?

LXD snap had caused some issues for me. I didn't have any issues with it when it was packaged as a distribution package. Plus I briefly considered it again when VM management came out, but Proxmox still won over it.

[sofixa]

Disclaimer: I work at Hashicorp.

There's also Nomad which has an LXC plugin alongside all the others.

[mroche]

>Didn't know RHEV was being killed. It makes sense, the enterprise virtualisation market is shrinking by the day, but it's still a bummer there's less competition. Is oVirt being maintained?

With the release of RHV 4.4 a few years back, it's become the last RHV release and will be maintained until its EOL in 2024 (ELS 2026). Like any open-source project, oVirt will be maintained by whoever wants to work on it, be it Red Hat engineers, other virtualization organizations, or just random contributors. But RH engineers won't be payrolled to work on oVirt on a daily basis.

> Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.

I don necessarily disagree, I was just pointing out one commercial virtualization solution that theoretically could operate large scale deployments. I don't typically see alternate products like Proxmox come up often in discussions (I honestly only know one person personally using it), but virtualization isn't my forté either, so there's that.

[rwmj]

oVirt is open source, although it unfortunately doesn't have a large development community. But it would still be a good starting point if someone wanted to create an open source VMware replacement.

[sfjailbird]

Perhaps the poster is using the term 'virtualization' imprecisely, if s/he is deep in the VMWare world. Another interpretation would be that companies are looking to move to containerization on OpenShift, which would make a lot more sense.

[simonebrunozzi]

If you read it carefully, it's very clear that the poster is talking about multiple customers, not just one.

A dozen or more companies (poster claims it's exactly 14) can move 100k-500k VMs in a short time frame, without killing anything.

Otherwise, your concern would have been spot on.

[mroche]

I didn't see the 14 on my first read through last night (I read this at like 1:30 in the morning), but that would make much more sense. I interpreted the "some" as a handful at most, which is why I said "footprints" and not "footprint". Even in that situation, I would probably still recommend not going the OpenShift Virtualization route. Obviously these groups would have different deployment sizes, but I would still personally be wary of moving several thousand VMs to OpenShift as part of a cost saving measure if there wasn't an intent to migrate to containers over time (based on the OpenShift Virtualization of today).

That's not to say it's not possible or a bad idea, just that each org would need to evaluate for themselves. We do have customers that have made this just and are running OpenShift clusters with >1k VMs on OpenShift Virtualization.

[pabs3]

So OpenShift virt replaces oVirt? What was the reason for dropping oVirt?

[mroche]

Remember, oVirt an upstream virtualization project, the product we derive from it is Red Hat Virtualization (RHV). From the development and deployment side of things, Red Hat has chosen a direction that is primarily container based going into the future, betting a lot of this on OpenShift. This decision was made a few years ago before anything with Broadcom/VMware was occurring.

OpenShift Virtualization (based on KubeVirt) exists to provide a path of migration for "legacy" VM environments to containers, allowing admins to maintain one platform in a consistent manner (Kubernetes resources) while giving the teams that can to evolve their applications to containerized deployments.

I believe there are plans to get the management capabilities of RHV into OpenShift Virtualization, I'm not quite sure how far that's gotten. In terms of virtualization solutions from Red Hat, we have the following:

- KVM on RHEL. With the announcement of the RHV EOL, we removed the restrictions on how many guest VMs you can run simultaneously on RHEL. Note that this is different from the RHEL for Virtual Data Center (VDC) subscriptions we sell; it's just the removal of the contractual limitation, it doesn't entitle your guests.

- Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: already discussed.

- Red Hat OpenStack: If you need to be running a broad private cloud platform that has a virtualization component.

[ghaff]

KubeVirt is the upstream. Essentially so there is common management/operational model between virtualization and containers rather than having a Kubernetes-based one and a largely independent virtualization one.

[jollybean]

Yeah, I think the hint is that something is going on here.

Like possibly a national security issue of some kind.

'We' are at 'war' with Russia, after all.

[dredmorbius]

I've no information on what's going on, or even if anything's going on. Other than today's SEC announcement of fraud findings: <https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/12/the-sec-revealed-today-tha...>

That said, I'd keep an eye on any future 0-day announcements ... if there's anything here, it has that kind of smell about it.

[jollybean]

That's what I mean. And because it's CEOs and not CTOs it's likely a Zero-Day related to something geopolitical.

The West is at war, my downvoting detractors are naive to not contemplate that the world's #2 Army is not running shenanigans as they have literally publicly stated they would, and we have direct evidence to support it. And literally Biden gov. urging US businesses to 'patch up' at the start of the war. They are looking for whatever leverage they can. And there are other capable enemies notably China and North Korea.

If in fact this rumour is true, i.e. 'CEOs doing this at the same time' then this could very well be a national security issue.

[dredmorbius]

That's close to my read, though again, based on a report of undetermined validity and circumstantial information only.

So: heightened alertness, but not immediate panic.