oVirt Blog
We are delighted to announce the general availability of oVirt 4.2, as of December 19, 2017, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.
oVirt 4.2 is an altogether more powerful and flexible open source virtualization solution. The release is a major milestone for the project, encompassing over 1000 individual changes and a wide range of enhancements spanning storage, network, engine, user interface, and analytics.
What’s new in oVirt 4.2?
The big new features:
The Administration Portal has been redesigned using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes […]
The oVirt project now includes a unified metrics and logs real-time monitoring solution for the oVirt environment.
Using Elasticsearch – a search and analytics engine – and its native visualization layer, Kibana, we now provide oVirt project users with a fully functional monitoring solution.
The solution includes self-service dashboards for creating your own dashboard, reports, and log analysis for both the engine and VDSM logs.
The Kibana dashboard
Combining Elasticsearch and kibana – both built on top of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) – with the collectd and fluentd client-side daemons, results in a powerful […]
In 4.2 release we have introduced a possibility to customize the host-deploy process by running the Ansible post-tasks after the host-deploy process successfully finishes.
The reason
Prior to oVirt 4.2 release administrators could customize host’s firewall rules using engine-config option IPTablesConfigSiteCustom.
Unfortunately writing custom iptables rules into string value to be used in engine-config was very user unfriendly and using engine-config to provide custom
firewalld rules would be even much worse. Because of above we have introduced Ansible integration as a part of host deploy flow, which allows administrators to
add any custom actions executed on the host during host […]
In 4.2 release we have splitted our oVirt Ansible roles into separate RPM packages and also separate git repositories, so it is possible for user to install specific role either from Ansible Galaxy or as RPM package.
The reason
The reason to split the roles into separate packages and git repositories was mainly the usage from the AWX/Ansible Tower. Since Ansible Galaxy is only integrated with github you need to store your Ansible role in single git repostiory in order to have separate Ansible role in Galaxy. Previously we used one single repository where we have stored […]
Now oVirt features a simple way to prevent a host from scanning and then activating logical volumes that are not required directly by the host. In particular, the solution addresses logical volumes on shared storage managed by oVirt, and logical volumes created by a guest in oVirt raw volumes. Why is a solution required? Because scanning and activating other logical volumes may cause data corruption, slow boot, and other issues.
The solution is configuring an LVM filter on each host, which allows LVM on a host to scan only the logical volumes required directly by the host. To achieve […]
In oVirt 4.2 we have introduced support for the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).
It is used by network devices for advertising the identity and capabilities to
neighbors on a LAN. The information gathered by the protocol can be used for better
network configuration. Learn more about LLDP.
Why do you need LLDP?
When adding a host into oVirt cluster, the network administrator usually needs to attach
various networks to it. However, a modern host can have multiple interfaces, each
with its non-descriptive name.
Examples
In the screenshot below, taken from the Administration Portal, a network administrator has to know
to […]
on November 8, oVirt 4.2 saw the introduction of an important behind-the-scenes enhancement.
The change is associated with the exchange of information between the engine and the VDSM. It addresses the issue of multiple abstraction layers, with each layer needing to convert its input into a suitably readable format in order to report to the next layer.
This change improves data communication between the engine and Libvirt – the tool that manages platform virtualization.
Background
Previously, the configuration file for a newly created virtual machine (VM) originated in the engine as a map or dictionary.
Then, […]
Assume you have an oVirt cluster with hundreds of VM networks. Now you add a
new host to the cluster. In order for it to move to the Operational state,
it must have all required networks attached to it. The easiest way to do it is
to attach networks to a label, and then place that label on a NIC of the added
host. However, if there are too many networks, Engine could fail to setup them
all at once. This is caused by a slow VDSM setupNetworks call that is not able
to finish within the 180 seconds long vdsTimeout of Engine.
VDSM […]
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 […]
On behalf of oVirt and the Xen Project, we are excited to announce that the call for proposals is now open for the Virtualization & IaaS devroom at the
upcoming FOSDEM 2018.
This year will mark FOSDEM’s 18th anniversary as one of the longest-running free and open source software developer events, attracting thousands of
developers and users from all over the world. FOSDEM will take place in Brussels, Belgium, February 3 & 4, 2018.
Also coming up is DEVCOM, The 10th annual, free community conference for developers, admins, and users of free and open source Linux, JBoss technologies. DEVCONF will […]
