RHV, Red Hat Virtualization, is an excellent enterprise-level virtualization solution but it has been announced that it will reach an end of support.

According to the news from Red Hat, the maintenance support of Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 is scheduled to end on August 31, 2024, because Red Hat decides to devote to contributing OpenShift so companies should migrate VMs from RHV to another virtualization platform in case of any interruption to business systems. This post will discuss one of the alternative virtualization solutions oVirt, which is very similar to RHV.

RHV/RHEV and oVirt

Red Hat Virtualization, which was formerly called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, is a popular open-source virtualization solution, majorly contributed by Red Hat, and it is closely related to another open-source project oVirt, which is a community-driven project that provides the upstream codebase for Red Hat Virtualization.

Red Hat takes the codebase from oVirt and uses it as the foundation for their proprietary virtualization solution: Red Hat Virtualization, RHV so compared with oVirt, RHV provides additional features and more stable performance.

On the other hand, oVirt is free and open-source but RHV is a commercial solution supported by Red Hat sot that RHV is a better choice for enterprises.

However, overall, RHV and oVirt share a common codebase and have a close relationship, RHV users will quickly adapt to the oVirt environment.

RHV/RHEV vs oVirt

Before selecting oVirt as the alternative virtualization, you can have an overview of the feature comparison.

Although oVirt might be still developed by the community, with less contribution from Red Hat, there might be more bugs in the future versions so it can be said that oVirt will be also impacted in another way.

No matter you select oVirt or other virtualization solutions to replace RHV, you need to move the VM from RHV hosts. The migration solution will be introduced in the next section.

How to migrate from RHV to oVirt or another virtualization platform?

Common VM migration solution requires complex procedures including exporting and importing VM and configuring virtual environment, which takes a lot of time and has a low success rate. To protect data and guarantee business continuity, companies should find a professional VM migration solution.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a professional enterprise backup solution for virtual environments like VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, oVirt, RHV, OpenStack, OLVM, etc. Except for backing up VM, it also support easy VM migration between different virtualization platforms by directly restoring a VM on a heterogeneous virtualization platform.

A user-friendly web console will help you easily create backup and restore jobs.

1. Create RHV VM backup:

    1) Select the RHV VMs to backup

    2) Select the storage to store the backup

    3)Select the strategies for the backup job

    4) Submit the job

2. Migrate RHV VM to oVirt host:

    1) Select the restore point of the RHV VM backup

    2) Select the oVirt host as the destination

    3) Select restore strategies

    4) Submit the job

After the restore job is finished, the RHV VM will be moved to the oVirt host and you can try starting the services on oVirt host.

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Sum Up

With the upcoming end of RHV announced, related users should seek an alternative virtualization solution for the VM. oVirt is the upstream project of RHV so users can quickly adapt to the new environment.

However, users should not neglect the drawbacks of oVirt because it is a community-driven virtualization solution so there might be more problems when using this virtualization solution.

If you decide to select oVirt to replace RHV, you can use Vinchin Backup & Recovery to easily migrate VM from RHV to oVirt to seamlessly transition to the new virtual environment. Don’t miss the free trial.