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Comment by regecks | Hacker News Reader

Comparison with https://www.ovirt.org/ ?

They don't really work at the same scale.

Kimchi is for managing a single host. Ovirt is aimed at managing datacenters, so it handles things like network, clusters, etc.

Probably a better comparison is to virt-manager, which is also single-node management, albeit as a native (Python + Gtk) app. https://virt-manager.org/

Recommended system requirements for a decent oVirt installation are huge by comparison with Kimchi's. However, Kimchi is much less configurable than oVirt. So far as I can make out, oVirt is best suited for clustered virtualization whilst Kimchi aims mainly for single server virtualization. At least, that's how I'm using it and it seems to work well. I asked our sys admin whether oVirt would work for my HP MicroSever and he said something more lightweight would be better.

I currently manage an oVirt installation and was surprised to see almost 20GB of memory allocated on the management node before I had a single VM spun up. It's not light, but it is powerful. Makes resizing disks, setting up networks, connecting to storage domains (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, etc), migrating VMs, logging, and many other common tasks very easy to do. The latest release, 4.0 has a beautiful dashboard that gives you a quick overview of your pool of resources.

Finally, every guest OS I've run has a build of an ovirt agent that reports back to the management node on its configuration (installed software, cpu/mem/io usage, ip addresses, hostname, etc).

I suspect that 20GB is probably down to the JBoss and/or JVM parameters which are sized for running a datacenter.

I believe it's related in some way, but I cannot for the life of me find the direct connection. I can tell you that kimchi developer contacts all use @ovirt.org emails and mailing lists.

https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/wiki/Communications

Kimchi project was started by the same IBM developers in Beijing that were contributing to oVirt.

Very nice folks I must say. It was a pleasure to collaborate with them in oVirt.

Maybe it's a next gen UI for ovirt?

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