CentOS - Apr 2021 - Proxmox Backup Server equivalent for the RHEL/CentOS world ?

> Once upon a time, Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr> said:
>> Both PVE and PBS are based on Debian, and now I wonder if RHEL-based
>> systems
>> have something similar to offer.
>
> I believe Red Hat Virtualization, and its open upstream oVirt, are
> comparable to Proxmox.  I have used oVirt for a number of years.  oVirt
> itself doesn't include backup software (it supports VM snapshots and
> clones), but there are several third-party backup tools (both free and
> commercial) compatible with oVirt/RHV, like Storeware's vProtect (I
> haven't used it but seen others mention it).
I haven't followed oVirt/RHV but I'm wondering how free it is? Is it as
"free" as RHEL or as CentOS/Alma/Rocky/Navy/Oracle Linux?

BTW, from what I know Proxmox does make use of ZFS for some nice features,
does oVirt/RHV have some comparable solutions?

Thanks,
Simon

On 13.04.21 12:33, Simon Matter wrote:
>> Once upon a time, Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr> said:
>>> Both PVE and PBS are based on Debian, and now I wonder if
RHEL-based
>>> systems
>>> have something similar to offer.
>>
>> I believe Red Hat Virtualization, and its open upstream oVirt, are
>> comparable to Proxmox.  I have used oVirt for a number of years.  oVirt
>> itself doesn't include backup software (it supports VM snapshots
and
>> clones), but there are several third-party backup tools (both free and
>> commercial) compatible with oVirt/RHV, like Storeware's vProtect (I
>> haven't used it but seen others mention it).
> 
> I haven't followed oVirt/RHV but I'm wondering how free it is? Is
it as
> "free" as RHEL or as CentOS/Alma/Rocky/Navy/Oracle Linux?
Upstream -> Product

Fedora -> RHEL
oVirt  -> RHV


--
Leon

Once upon a time, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch>
said:
> I haven't followed oVirt/RHV but I'm wondering how free it is? Is
it as
> "free" as RHEL or as CentOS/Alma/Rocky/Navy/Oracle Linux?
oVirt is the upstream for RHV.  Development takes place in oVirt, but
(to me anyway) like Fedora, that doesn't mean it is an unfinished or
beta product - they do development and have test releases and such.
But, like any freely-available software, sometimes you get to find new
ways to break it (and then go hunting for help on mailing lists and
such). :)  I've run oVirt in production for over 6 years (don't actually
remember exactly when I started but at least that long).
> BTW, from what I know Proxmox does make use of ZFS for some nice features,
> does oVirt/RHV have some comparable solutions?
All of my oVirt experience has been with external iSCSI storage arrays -
my main cluster was a mail server farm for 60K residential users, so we
needed TBs of fast storage.  oVirt supports a hyperconverged setup with
Gluster as well; I set it up once in a lab, but we didn't end up using
it (so I can't offer any experience with it).

We used to have a TrueNAS (commercial FreeBSD+ZFS storage array), and...
we had issues with it.  I was not a fan and probably would avoid ZFS and
FreeNAS/TrueNAS based on my experiences (but maybe they've gotten
better).  We hit multiple bugs with it that took a long time to resolve.
We were also unhappy with the hardware and its support from iX Systems
(the company behind FreeNAS/TrueNAS).

Aside from bugs, one drawback of ZFS for me was that, when we needed
more storage and added more drives, there was no way to rebalance the
space.  We ended up getting "hot spots" because a flood of data was
written to just the new drives.  The ZFS "solution" is just to backup
and restore your data (which is not an enterprise or highly available
option to me).

Rebalance is hard, but I ran DEC Unix back in the day, and their AdvFS
not only supported rebalance, it ran it regularly from a cron job (which
may have been a hack around the kernel not balancing well to begin with
of course).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>