Redhat – Getting started with KVM coming from Vmware

centos6high-availabilitykvm-virtualizationredhatvmware-vcenter

In order to test new ideas and reduce cost I would like to test KVM.
I think Vmware has these 3 things which are valuable:
– HA which restart VMs (Virtual Machines) in other hosts when a Hardware failure.
– DRS which basically is an intelligent VM placement when a hosts is overcommited
– vMotion which migrates VMs up and running to other hosts.

So my question:
Can I get those 3 features using KVM? I suppose I need a KVM Central Console equivalent to vCenter?

is there such console offering those 3 things? for free?
Will Openstack cover those 3?

is just I need to talk to my boss about moving to KVM but I know for sure he will ask OK…does it have the same capabilities as Vmware has?

Which Linux do you recommend to run KVM. CentOS?

thanks a lot guys

Best Answer

Some partial answers to get you going in the right direction...too big for a comment.

Pretty sure that Redhat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) can do all that you want. It's not free. oVirt is the open source that it is based on. I have not used it.

Archipel is another orchestrator option.

I don't know what all openstack can do.

You may be tempted to use the RHEL/CentOS virtualization manager GUI - don't bother. It is next to worthless. The only networking it can set up is either host-only or NAT. Bridged is quite possible, and is what you want - but that GUI doesn't have this option.

Also, note that libvirtd (the management layer that works above KVM and other hypervisors) and/or KVM are crippled on RHEL (and presumably CentOS). In particular, they do not include vmotion-equivalent functionality, even though the base open source project does. I suspect you can find builds that include all the functionality, but I haven't looked.

From the command line, you can do (almost?) everything for a standalone hypervisor with libvirtd's virsh shell. I haven't figured out how to make it "own" a bridge device that I created manually, but it can hook VMs into it with no problem.

There are standalone tools for working with disk images. KVM supports lots of different types but you will probably want to use qcow2 images and/or raw devices (likely LVM volumes, but hey, whatever floats your boat). I think qcow2 is the only one that supports snapshots with support from libvirtd.

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