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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Upstream, virt-v2v supports conversions from VMware to either oVirt (RHV) or KubeVirt (OSV), and we don't plan to drop the oVirt support any time soon.

However Red Hat now only supports conversions to OSV, since RHV was deprecated (sadly).

The biggest problem is oVirt itself has not proven to be a very sustainable open source project. If oVirt dies, we'll likely remove support in v2v. (There's a great start up opportunity here, for a dull but money-making company that productizes oVirt again.)

To move VMs from RHV to OSV you can just copy the disk image since they already should have virtio drivers, qemu guest agent, and be able to boot on any qemu/KVM-based platform. I believe there's some automation for that, but it doesn't involve virt-v2v.

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Thank you for taking the time to explain. I was honestly a little shocked to hear about RH moving away from RHV, but glad to hear there is some interoperability between some of these tools.

There never was a lot of interest in RHV as a like-to-like VMware alternative. But, when I left, there was quite a lot of interest (especially post-Broadcom acquisition) in a Kubernetes/cloud-native friendly VM alternative to VMware. And, yes, there are various migration tools though I was not involved in the details.

> There never was a lot of interest in RHV as a like-to-like VMware alternative

That is because it was before Broadcom lit VMware on fire. Nowadays everyone is looking for a like for like VMware alternative.

> Kubernetes/cloud-native friendly VM alternative to VMware

Cloud-native and VMs for the people used to the VMware world are antithetical. Overwhelmingly we're talking about carefully managed pets, which is exactly the opposite of cloud-native.

I agree, hence my idea about resurrecting oVirt (see up thread). Red Hat are all-in on Kubernetes, which is the wrong model for pet VMs, but a better model for gitops stuff.

I'd argue it's still essentially backward facing. Yes. There are buyers who would essentially like a cheaper VMware clone today. But I'm not at all convinced that's a good business model for a company like Red Hat to invest in going forward.

> There are buyers who would essentially like a cheaper VMware clone today. But I'm not at all convinced that's a good business model for a company like Red Hat to invest in going forward.

Yes, they're buyers stuck in the past. If RH can bring them on and take them on a modernisation journey, it could be very lucrative (even if very time consuming).

Thank you for the explanation

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