Event Recap: oVirt Shanghai Workshop

Last month, over 80 users and developers gathered at Intel’s Shanghai China Campus for a two-day workshop centered on oVirt, the Open Virtualization management platform.

Jackson He, General Manager of Intel Asia and Pacific R&D Ltd. and Intel Software and Services Group PRC, provided the opening keynote, in which he spoke to a mostly local audience about Intel’s growth in China and continued commitment to open source software including such projects as oVirt, OpenStack, KVM and Hadoop. Intel’s continued commitment to Open Source virtualization was further demonstrated throughout the Workshop with great presentations by Gang Wei and Dongxiao Xu.

With three tracks spread across two days, this was the first workshop that also featured a day long Gluster Operations Track. This track, lead by John Mark Walker, Community Lead for Gluster, allowed for not only introductions and examples of leveraging GlusterFS storage solutions with oVirt, but also more advanced discussions, including a talk on developing with libgfapi, the GlusterFS translator framework, presented by Vijay Bellur, a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.

In conjunction with the Gluster track on the first day of the workshop was the primary oVirt Operations track. With Red Hat presentations ranging from an introduction to oVirt to getting into the weeds of Troubleshooting, oVirt attendees were exposed to all levels of operational use cases and deployment tips. Presentations from IBM engineers Shu Ming and Mark Wu provided solid operational discussions covering oVirt testing in a nested virtualization configuration and outlining IBM’s commitment to and planned development objectives for oVirt.

The second day was all about oVirt developers. Of particular interest to attendees was a presentation by Zhengsheng Zhou of IBM discussing work done to support oVirt on Ubuntu. A key highlight of this event is the continued growth and interest around open virtualization solutions, with oVirt serving a foundational role. The interest in making oVirt available to other platforms is greatly encouraging, and we’re excited to see the community grow to include new platforms.

Also on day two, Doron Fediuck of Red Hat presented on oVirt SLAs, enforced by MoM, the Memory Overcommitment Manager. This presentation also provided a roadmap moving forward on this and other key features. Great discussions on this and most of the presentations allowed for developers to get engaged and focus in on where to help moving forward.

Presentations from the event are now available on the oVirt website.

With over 80 attendees representing Intel, IBM, Red Hat as well as the greater oVirt and Gluster communities, we’re pleased that this workshop was a success.