I ran a gaggle of RL9 hosts offering libvirt as a precursor to jumping off ESXi, all of it while testing alternatives like oVirt (and ALVM/OLVM) and OpenNebula. Finally, the weird requirement to run ansible in a container to get the dependencies right as a dependency to running any oVirt was a bridge way, way too far.
I’ve used Puppet, Chef/Cinc, and 25 years ago we used RPM installs, triggers, make, cron and sed/awkas templaters for DevOps long before they called it that. I’ve used Ansible exensively for the last few years, at my day job. Puppet, or the make/cron/sed/awk/rpmsimple watch-and-converge setup, and especially chef, were all absolutely light-years ahead of what ansible does now. And orders of magnitude faster. I will switch cinc for mgmt(configmgmt.com) when I get up on it because it’s amazing and should be the orchestration under oVirt because it’s real-time. I competed for and won my last job while requiring a temporary wage adjustment while they continued to use ansible. It was a couple-thousand a year, and it’s now part of any interview with a company using ansible or outlook. But aside from a recommendation to learn and run anything else, that’s all I’ll say about Ansible.
I’m deploying proxmox - the only non-Enterprise Linux device at any site - and since it’s replacing ESXi, the amount of out-of-band patching we’ll need is about the same effort. Snowflake patch, bounce, hold nose, move on. Sleep at night.
oVirt looked great. But its install was crunchy and frail … usually because ansible would choke on a repo URL or something. OLVM’s install was better, actually, due to a little fresher maintenance. ALVM was almost as good, and Alma people are also great people. If you wanna run an oVirt and you’re okay with ansible, then go grab ALVM and try that.
But here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna worry about how much you have to futz with things – I mean, it’s fun when you have time, but you need to have a stable daily driver so you can get work done, and leave experimentation to the weekend. You’re gonna come back to Proxmox, you’re going to explore Gluster and DRBD/Linstor, because you heard about ceph freaking out and losing reams of data. But, I mean, xfs did too. And Ceph got better. So you’re gonna pick ceph, using the webUI to set it up, and you’re gonna stop messing with your production/tools cluster at that point, and you’re gonna mess with virtual-in-virtual and try all the things again and it’s gonna be super fun.
But when you’re doing that, if you go VM on LIbvirt VM host on Proxmox, and you start working with pacemaker/keepalive (the latter’s easy as pie) and gluster and all those things, and you build some scaffolding scripts to manage disks and vMotion and all that, I think it’s going to be a great topic for discussion.