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OpenStack is free, open-source and scalable software cloud computing platform for building public and private clouds. It is released under the terms of the Apache License. It consists of a series of interrelated projects each delivering various components of a cloud infrastructure solution (processing, storage, and networking resources for a data center etc.). It is managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API.
oVirt is a virtual datacenter manager, which offers centralized management for server and desktop virtualization through powerful management of multiple virtual machines on multiple hosts. It is an Open Management Framework for Virtualized Environments, an open source alternative to vCenter/vSphere. It is a free platform virtualization management web application community project which is backed by from Red Hat and it is the upstream for RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization). oVirt builds on KVM, the hypervisor technology integrated into the Linux kernel. Powered by KVM on Linux, oVirt offers a stand-alone hypervisor or can be installed on top of an existing Linux platform on an easy-to-use web interface.
Yes and No. Yes, because both are answering the requirements of an enterprise virtualization. No, because both are aimed at different class of users. From a distance, one may feel that oVirt and OpenStack are competing projects, both looking to solve the same problem. But they aren't. Their short-term goals are very different. They address different set of audiences.
OpenStack, by virtue of its IaaS origins, is aimed to solve the mulit-tenant datacenter problem. By focusing on massive scale, both in terms of nodes as well as tenants, it allows you to run a large scale IaaS cloud in your own datacenter. OpenStack is aiming an Elastic Cloud type network – where people can buy server time, create instances, install applications, more or less what they want by themselves.
oVirt, on the other hand, is focusing on a much smaller scale. It wants to let you manage a pool of resources so that you can distribute your virtual workloads across them in an efficient manner. oVirt is more for centrally-maintained networks of virtual machines, like enterprise IT, university labs, and test rigs.
By focusing on a different set of users, the two technologies, currently each have an important place in the datacenter. So there are different priorities, different technology choices, and different target audiences. OpenStack aims to be an open source Amazon Web Services, while oVirt aims to be an open source vSphere. The former inclines toward more automation in a smaller scale, while the latter toward more flexibility in a larger scale.
As the spheres of datacenter virtualization come together and more closer with IaaS, the two projects fates are more likely to merge together to provide ultimate value for developers, users, and customers. There’s a good deal of overlap though. It is possible to run through the OpenStack projects, and draw parallels between pieces of the OpenStack architecture/components and pieces of the oVirt architecture/components. Integration is the need of the hour. Such Integration bridges the gap between a small datacenter to a large IaaS Platform, enabling OpenStack to interact with different vendors/platforms and making it a truly platform agnostic solution.
Both projects are using consume & provide model to share the features with each other. oVirt, from its 3.3 version, started leveraging technology from the OpenStack project. oVirt has integrated OpenStack Glance and OpenStack Neutron components. Use of features in different projects by sharing them, allows the a project community to concentrate on requirements specific to their audiences while still offering users the capabilities they need, by means of allowing collaboration, integration and sharing. Such integrations are steps towards realization of Open Hybrid Cloud strategy - a strong association with OpenStack and related OSS projects such as KVM, QEMU, libvirt, oVirt and Gluster.
As an enterprise-class datacenter manager, oVirt is an excellent solution for enhancing OpenStack. oVirt platform capabilities are exposed to OpenStack using drivers that map OpenStack requests into their oVirt equivalents.
- Nova - oVirt Driver
- Cinder - oVirt Driver