The oVirt Project is pleased to announce the availability of its sixth formal release, oVirt 3.5.

oVirt is an open source alternative to VMware vSphere, and provides an excellent KVM management interface for multi-node virtualization.

To find out more about features which were added in previous oVirt releases, check out the oVirt 3.4 release notes, oVirt 3.3 release notes, oVirt 3.2 release notes and oVirt 3.1 release notes. For a general overview of oVirt, read the oVirt 3.0 feature guide and the about oVirt page.

oVirt 3.5 Release Notes

Live Merge

If an image has one or more snapshots, oVirt 3.5's merge command will combine the data of one volume into another. Live merges can be performed with data is pulled from one snapshot into another snapshot. The engine can merge multiple disks at the same time and each merge can independently fail or succeed in each operation.

Note: This is currently a restricted use case. You must be running a Fedora 20 host that has been updated from the virt-preview yum repository. See this page for more details.

Import Storage Domain

This latest release expands oVirt's feature of importing ISOs and exporting storage domains to expand support for importing an existing data storage domain. Based on information stored in the storage domain, oVirt can revive entities such as disks, virtual machines, and templates in the setup of any data center to which the storage domain is attached.

Advanced Foreman Integration

oVirt 3.5 adds the capability to provision and add hypervisors to oVirt from bare metal. Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. Through deep integration with configuration management, DHCP, DNS, TFTP, and PXE-based unattended installations, Foreman manages every stage of the lifecycle of your physical or virtual servers. Integrating Foreman with oVirt helps add hypervisor hosts managed by Foreman to the oVirt engine.

Enhanced Authentication, Authorization and Accounting Support

A new architecture has been built for oVirt 3.5's authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) system. The enhancements will provide a clear separation of authentication from authorization and provide a developer API to develop custom extensions for authentication and authorization.

New PatternFly Interface

oVirt 3.5 will have a new look and feel, using PatternFly, the open interface project. The new look and feel aims to maintain the colors and spirit associated with oVirt, while updating it with a new, modern, sleek, and minimal look. The minimal design allows complex screens to look cleaner and airier, and lets the user focus on the data and the tasks by removing all extraneous visual elements.

Advanced Scheduling with Optaplanner

The Optaplanner is a new service that takes a snapshot of a cluster (a list of hosts and VMs) and computes an optimized VM-to-Host assignment solution. Optimization will is done on per Cluster basis. The administrator can use this information as a hint to tweak the cluster to better utilize resources.

Other Enhancements

Infra

• JSON remote procedure call over stomp was added to the communication layer between the engine and VDSM. This new protocol is designed to be simple, require less parsing than the currently implemented XML remote procedure calls, and introduces asynchronous communication.

Networking

• Unified Persistence is a way for oVirt-defined network configurations in hosts to be set in a format that is distribution agnostic and that closely matches the oVirt network setup API.
• A Neutron Virtual Appliance will be available from the oVirt Image Repository (glance.ovirt.org). For 3.5, the appliance is based on OpenStack IceHouse, listed as ""Neutron Appliance (CentOS X.X) - IceHouse-YYYY.X-XX" on the provided images list.

Integration

• It is now possible to setup the engine and WebSocket-Proxy, DWH, Reports on separate hosts.
• Hosted Engine has now added support for iSCSI storage, VLAN-tagged network interfaces, bonded network interfaces, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (or similar).
• oVirt Windows Guest Tools for oVirt 3.5 are now available as a release candidate.

Install / Upgrade from Previous Versions

Fedora / CentOS / RHEL

oVirt 3.5 is now available for use. In order to install it on a clean system, you need to install

     # yum localinstall http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/ovirt-release35.rpm

If you are upgrading from a previous version, you should have the ovirt-release34 package already installed on your system.You can then install ovirt-release35.rpm as in a clean install side-by-side.

If you are upgrading from oVirt < 3.4.1, you must first upgrade to oVirt 3.4.1 or later.Please see oVirt 3.4.1 release notes for upgrade instructions.

Once ovirt-release35 package is installed, you will have the ovirt-3.5-stable repository and any other repository needed for satisfying dependencies enabled by default.

If you're installing oVirt 3.5 on a clean host, you should read our Quick Start Guide.

If you're using pre-release repo you'll need to re-enable pre release repository:

[ovirt-3.5-pre]
name=Latest oVirt 3.5 Pre Release
#baseurl=http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-3.5-pre/rpm/fc$releasever/
mirrorlist=http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/mirrorlist-ovirt-3.5-pre-fc$releasever
enabled=1
skip_if_unavailable=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-ovirt-3.5

and to run:

    # yum update "ovirt-engine-setup*"
    # engine-setup

oVirt Live

An oVirt Live ISO is available:

http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-3.5/iso/ovirt-live-el6-3.5.0.iso

oVirt Node

An oVirt Node build will be also available soon in:

http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-3.5/iso

Pre-release version is still available here:

http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-3.5-pre/iso/ovirt-node-iso-3.5.0.ovirt35.20140630.el6.iso

• To circumvent some SELinux issues, please append enforcing=0 to the kernel commandline when booting the ISO.
• The ISO is missing the plugin for Hosted Engine, but we hope to deliver an iso that includes this plugin shortly.

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