I have worked with RHEL server and desktop in the enterprise space for some 15 years up until about 7 years ago. I’ve seen changes in strategy over that time period as virtualization has taken hold. The available tools these days provide some interesting solutions beyond what was available 10 years ago. I’ve used the RH libvirt/QEMU/KVM from the outset when RH first released that technology.
Having experience with RH virtualization, including virt-manager, I’ve been playing with xcp-ng and Proxmox to manage a virtualization environment which are proving interesting in comparison to the aging RH virt-manager solution for administrating a virtual server environment.
When you have more than a handful of virtualization servers, virt-manager becomes wielding. It looks as though RH is moving toward a service based cluster management solution through Kubernetes for supporting a virtual computing environment. Maybe I’m missing something here from a RH perspective. Any comments/perspectives?
Doesn’t RH push cockpit for small scale and even tried to drop the virt-manager out?
I’ve seen “oVirt” mentioned, but whose brew is it?
@jlehtone I’ve been away from architecting the computing infrastructure long enough that I don’t get the first word directly from RH. I’ve played with cockpit, but it is too immature. Possibly the reason why virt-manager is still hanging around. Originally, when RH purchased virt-manager, it only ran on Window$ 
It took a few years before RH published a Linux version, ditching Windoze.
This is also usable with a basic Linux install with KVM: GitHub - kimchi-project/kimchi: An HTML5 management interface for KVM guests screenshots also in the README.
@jlehtone Looks like Oracle Linux packages it with their distribution. Looks like RH is a contributing sponsor to oVirt as well as Cockpit. According to that article, it works side-by-side with Ansible for configuration management. There is a plugin for oVirt to incorporate Cockpit as an oVirt plugin. oVirt administrates the VMs while Cockpit provides an interface for general systems administration. It looks to be actively maintained off of github, but oVirt’s reference to the plugin says it is outdated (maybe, just the documentation?). Confusing.
I saw this on configuring for Rocky8 here.
@iwalker Interesting possibility, but looks to be fairly immature and really not supported by the mainstream distros. It does have a nice modern interface, though basic.
oVirt == Red Hat Virtualization
RHV is the commercial offering of oVirt hence their activity with oVirt, especially since they founded it.
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I suppose this depends on your perception of what is mainstream? I think the majority of people would certainly call Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE mainstream distros. Whilst others might not be on the list, it can most likely be utilised. If you are looking for support though, perhaps you need something a bit more commercial like oVirt/RHV.
XCP-NG is based on Citrix XenServer, and came about when Citrix decided to close everything down again. There was a while during 5.x and 6.x versions of Citrix XenServer that you could use it for free but certain features obviously were not available. You needed to obtain a free license key in able to use it. During I believe 6.5 versions the license didn’t need to be provided anymore, but then starting somewhere around 7.0.3 or 7.0.4 they started to lock it all down again. And thus, XCP-NG was born. During this time period I was using Citrix XenServer 6.5, and XOA or Xen Orchestra for web administration of Citrix XenServer was great. Obviously now since they’ve provided XCP-NG based on Citrix XenServer, that they’ve embedded this for managing the servers once they are installed. All-in-all, XOA was great. Haven’t used XCP-NG though personally, but expect it to be pretty much the same as when I was managing 6.5/7.0 servers prior to Citrix changing it all again.
Had to check: CentOS Virtualization SIG builds oVirt packages.
Oracle might very well do it too, considering the following:
The SIG builds for CentOS Streams. Installing to RHEL (and derivatives)
has some twists: Installing on RHEL | oVirt
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