I am also a vSphere enthusiast and work with it most of my worktime. I beleive that’s the superior product in the market far ahead of any other for many reasons.

However I do beleive RHEV is something quiet intresting for the time it has been developed. It based on Linux and that fact it uses its already rock-solid drivers gives a good assurance of stability along with the flexibiity of easily implementing new features (NFSv4, Gluster, etc and be in line with any new feature the kernel support (remember it’s just Linux underneath). I do also beleive after ESXi, KVM is the best Hypervisor that although don’t have all features of ESXi, will catch up at some point and will be the big competitor do VMware either people like or not. Xen and Hyper-V I won’t mention as serious comparisons.

I see on your posts that you are very passionate about VMware, so do I, but in your case this makes you look like you are being forced or paid to specificlly attack RHEV and the way you write takes out any credibility you suppose to have when having a blog about a certain subject and writing public.
It’s not inteligent at all you say thar you are no concerned if people take you seriously or not. Why do you have a blog then if you don’t mind to be taken seriously ? Seems to me a very vain answer to a criticism. Or just to try earn a “vExpert” stamp ?

It’s great you take the same tim compare the features between vSphere and RHEV and write about it, but be more reasonable on your comments, see the good things on competitors, they are out there, and don’t try to hide from a reality which is that Redhat or simply KVM is cooming to face VMware and that’s something that can’t be avoided. You have only two choices: Adapt yourself for the changes or Lose.

As Eric pointed out, RHVE does not have a P2V tool as of today. We are one of the few Red Hat Partners in Spain – please do not get me wrong here as I love Red Hat technology, after all I am a Linux guy – and two weeks ago Red Hat confirmed to us that its P2V tool is still beta.

Beside, we feel we have not been welcomed to Red Hat partner network, at least, not as much as with VMware partner program. We have reported to them a few problems during customers engagement and we did not get any support That looked bad on us but on Red Hat too as the customer noted that we were on our own.

I am not saying that Red Hat socks, all the opposite, we need companies like Red Hat to create an even bigger and better competition so that VMware and others wont sleep on their laurels

My two cents.

Jose Maria Gonzalez from El blog de Virtualizacion en Español

(I’m not aware of a comparable RHEV P2V tool, at least for Redhat. RHEV seems much more geared towards competing with Citrix, what with its desktop stuff and SPICE..)

Right now, I see RHEV as being an option for sites that have a single storage arch that will never change, underlying LUNs that will never be removed or resized, and have VMs important enough to only run on shared storage (as opposed to internal disk). The way I figure, if you’re going to go cheap, go free and hack together your own mgmt tools. If you’re not going to go cheap, why bother with the hassle?

Perhaps running RHEV with an NFS datastore is how they really expect it to be done, but I just don’t trust NFS that much, even on a Netapp. They claim they can support Oracle data stores over NFS. I just can’t buy it.

ps: Fault-tolerance (running VMs on multiple hypervisors in lockstep, possibly 3+ with constant ‘elections’ for data integrity) would be an exceptionally nice feature.