Advent and adventures

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(I think I used this picture before, and it’s still nice).

Happy third advent.

oVirt Node - some time has passed since it’s 4.0 release. We are actually close to finish 4.1. So far Node 4.0 (which is a redesign and is based on LVM to allow atomic rollbacks and a customizable file-system at the same time - and image based updates) has turned out to be quite stable at runtime. The bigger bugs which turned up, were in the areas where we expected them - the affected areas are points where we diverge from the stock operating system: kernel/initd location (some tools don’t work with our kernel/initrd locations), updates (you can update an image to itself), and image size (just generally slow). In oVirt 4.1 (and even in 4.0.z) we are still working to fix each of those issues one by one. We don’t want to rush, because we want to find the right solution.

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(We are stuck in a hamster wheel, but we do make progress)

On the long run we mainly got stabilization on our plate, and smaller improvements. A larger upcoming change is to allow an anaconda installclass to define installation constraints. We need this to enforce a specific partitioning layout. Let’s see if we can come up with something reasonable for upstream.

At the bottom line this logical rebase of Node onto fresh Fedora/CentOS technologies seems to have paied out for now. It reduced the number of bugs we had - especially around boot, hardware support, and persistence - it also reduced the amount of work we had to do on our administration UI - because we now leverage Cockpit (well - we actually need to find some time here to fix osme bugs in Cockpit which we uncovered when our flows got tested). The rebase allows us to share more code with other communities. Both of this is good to me: share and other communities.

Could this model actually be something we could apply to more of oVirt? oVirt is managing your datacenter (If not, then you want to try it ;) ) - To me the question is: Where do we have the opportunity to share more code with other communities?

Actually - We already do this to some degree. Like right now - heros are working on finally bringing NetworkManager support to vdsm. It’s crucial to have a nice Cockpit integration. But it’s also a lot of work. oVirt has grown for years from a closed .Net project to an open-source Java and Python project (Yes, there are omre languages involved) with a pretty broad user base (from what I can tell).

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(A hero)

Without risking the stability of the project it’s difficult to share code with other projects, because sharing code brings it’s own requirements i.e. schedule alignment and (obviously) our integration with this other (and always changing) project. Like for vdsm above: It was and is not easy to finally integrate NetworkManager into vdsm - but I’m confident that it will pay out. It actually already does - because of our integration with NetworkManager, bugs were found in Cockpit and NetworkManager. We don’t benefit from this directly - because for us it just means that we finally reach feature parity with our NetworkManager integration- but all users of NetworkManager benefit. It’s just harder to see, because it’s an indirect benefit. And in future we hopefully benefit by inheriting bug fixes and more features of NetworkManager.

So - It’s not easy to share and collaborate, but is it easier to build everything ouselves?

What can we - oVirt - share with others? Are there elements to share which are useful for us and would be useful for others too? Or: Are there already things out there which we could leverage more and collaborate with others? We’ll need to see, we need to look to see what we use in our own backyard, and we need to look to see what there is in the neighbourhood.

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(This is a cluster, a cluster of lamps)

oVirt is managing a cluster of machines, which form the infrastructure to run virtual machines on top.

Let’s start with this high-level view - and a couple of Spekulatius.

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::: {#footer} [ December 11th, 2016 1:12pm ]{#timestamp} [ovirt]{.tag} [node]{.tag} [kubernetes]{.tag} [cluster]{.tag} [rust]{.tag} [gnome]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} [kubevirt]{.tag} :::