RHEV additional licenses

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Hi All,

 

We are planning to use RHEL hosts for RHEV (instead of RHEV-H) with FC storage. My question would be: Do we need to buy additional Add-ons for the hosts like Resilient storage or High Availability if we want to use them only in RHEV?

 

Thanks and regards,

Balazs

Responses

No, you don't need any additional addons to run RHEL as hypervisor for RHEV. RHEV should be able to use RHEL6 as hypervisor, with FC storage directly. If you want to host your VMs on GFS2 (or IBM GPFS), I would expect you need separate licenses for that..

I tried using RHEL hypervisors when we first tested RHEV, and got into problems with our local configuration of iptables, sudo, etc.. and quickly decided that the thin hypervisors was a much better option (for us). It seemed to easy to break the thick hypervisor by normal system administration tasks..

Thanks for the answer.

 

We tested the RHEV-H hypervisor as well but we have to go with RHEL because of some limitations of the RHEV-H:

  • No kickstart installation is possible. It is using kernel parameters for automated installation which does not fit into our current infrastructure.
  • Install of 3rd party rpms are not supported (puppet). In this case they recommend to use RHEL as a host.
  • Change in files (like multipath.conf/rsyslog.conf) has to be done manually on the hosts and has a special way to keep the changes persistent.
  • It is not possible to configure rsyslog to use tcp through the TUI.

 

BTW, what kind of RHEL license do we need to buy for a RHEV cluster. Let say I would like to run unlimited guests on my two node RHEV cluster. Apart from the RHEV licenses, is it enough to have one RHEL subscription with unlimited guests and one with 1 guest or both of the subscriptions should be with unlimited guest?

 

Thanks and regards,

Balazs

Lack of automation of customizations felt strange at first, but there's not much you should need to customize, and in the end I think having a stripped down image is a large win. To configure your syslog settings you only need to log in to the hypervisor after installation, change the rsyslog.conf, and run "persist rsyslog.conf" to have the change persist over reboot. IMHO Red Hat should be providing functioning multipath.conf for the supported hardware, so you *shouldn't* need to customize it..

For running unlimited number of virtual machines on two thick hypervisor, my understanding is that you'll need one RHEV license per cpu-socket, plus one RHEL subscription with unlimited guests per physical host. You woun't get away with RHEL+1guest on a host unless you really intend to only run one guest there...

I agree on that you can get use to the manual config and manual installation process of RHEV-H. At the end it is pretty easy.

But we already have provisioning server (self developed) and configuration server (puppet) in place so to go with RHEL is much easier for us (and costs the same).

 

Thanks for the subscription part.

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