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When I read the wikipedia articles about RHEV and oVirt, I can't really figure out why Red Hat have both projects, as they seam to solve the same problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHEV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVirt

oVirt will be included in Fedora 17, so clearly they have invested a lot in both projects.

Is one of them a short term solution, or do they solve different problems/tasks?

Update

Based on this link, oVirt is only a manangement interface build up from common open source packages.

So I would speculate that the management part i RHEV will be replaced with oVirt at some point.

dyasny
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Sandra
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    well, you are wrong, or you did not read the feature page at all. oVirt is a set of products, where the ovirt-engine is the same as RHEV-Manager, ovirt-node is the upstream for RHEV-Hypervisor and so forth. Where on that page did you read that ovirt is only the management interface? – dyasny May 12 '12 at 07:00
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    oVirt is upstream, RHEV is downstream. They are the same project, only that RHEV is more stable. The update and accepted answer are completely wrong. – M.K. May 15 '12 at 12:43

3 Answers3

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RHEV is the stable version, while oVirt is upstream. Features from oVirt get merged into RHEV when stable and tested.

Consider Fedora and RHEL - Fedora is a rich distribution in terms of features and packages, but it's not supported commercially, has a short lifecycle, and is not geared towards stability. RHEL is based on Fedora, but it's code is tested and stabilized with lots of Fedora non-enterprise packages sacrificed to the amount of QE the company can do. Fedora is cool, new and kinda buggy, but perfectly fine for a Desktop. Will you run a mission critical server on Fedora? I'd personally get RHEL for that.

Same goes for oVirt - it's a bleeding edge development, off of which RHEV is based. oVirt is very new, but not as stable as RHEV, and has no commercial support. RHEV is not as advanced, but it's stable, well tested and geared towards the enterprise and mission critical systems.

M.K.
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dyasny
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  • So the long term goal is that RHEV should be phased out? – Sandra May 03 '12 at 22:18
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    of course not, you didn't read my post at all? RHEL does not get phased out by Fedora, right? – dyasny May 03 '12 at 22:24
  • I am well aware of Redhat uses Fedora to mature technologies, so my question is not about that oVirt is newer than RHEV, but rather why Redhat have two technologies that seam to me to do the same. KVM also wend into Fedora before RHEL, and when they felt KVM was good enough they phased out Xen. So is this also the case here? – Sandra May 03 '12 at 22:40
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    no, ovirt is used to mature the technology for RHEV, same as fedora is used for RHEL – dyasny May 03 '12 at 22:52
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    We've tried both before and if you are going to use this in a production environment I highly recommend using RHEV. It's a much more stable product. When using oVirt we had to use third party repos to get working where RHEV install was much easier and just worked out of the box . – J Baron May 21 '13 at 16:17
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oVirt is a community project, sponsored by Red Hat. It provides installers, a web GUI, and associated utilities and libraries for the management of virtual machines (KVM), storage (Gluster) and Networking.

RHEV is a product sold by Red Hat, run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (as of this writing) and which comes designated as "enterprise-ready". It is officially supported by Red Hat.

Fedora is rapidly developed by both Red Hat employees and community contributors and the technologies make their way into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. oVirt has the same relationship to RHEV. Rapid development takes place in the oVirt upstream and over time, the improvements will be released as a new version of RHEV and supported by Red Hat.

If your interest is geared at running virtual machines in a production or enterprise environment, backed with the support of Red Hat, RHEV is where you'll look. If you require more cutting edge features, or are interested in contributing to future releases, oVirt is what you want. Red Hat does not, and will not, offer support on oVirt.

K. Darien Freeheart
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They don't solve the same problem for sure.

  • RHEV -> Is itself a virtulization product like Vmware or Xen. Its a spiced up version of KVM.

  • oVirt -> Is the management interface developed by redhat to manage the virualization products/platforms.

    So they are meant for different reasons.

Chakri
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    You are wrong here. oVirt is the upstream product for RHEV, it provides management as well as hypervisor and guest side packages. RHEV is not a "spiced" up version of KVM, but a full virtualization suite, where KVM is the hypervisor. Do get your facts straight first – dyasny May 03 '12 at 22:01
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    Dude ! I might have oversimplified the response but wasn't wrong. Again the question wasn't about Fedora vs RHEL. – Chakri May 04 '12 at 17:11
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    of course you were wrong - its the same product. I used the fedora/ rhel example as an analogy, because the idea is exactly the same – dyasny May 04 '12 at 17:41
  • Delete this mate. It’s wrong. – Vinícius Ferrão Jan 25 '21 at 16:25