The first oVirt workshop starts up at 8:30 am on Tuesday 1 November at Cisco Building O in Milpitas, CA.
This event is the open sourcing of the code behind the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management console. These assets have been rewritten in Java from the original implementation by the team that was originally from Qumranet before their acquisition by Red Hat.
As with the rest of the open source virtualization stack (Linux kernel, KVM, etc.), we all benefit the most from a strong, sustainable open upstream. Having that upstream dominated by one vendor will greatly restrict the innovation possible by the project. For this reason, Red Hat went out to a number of interested parties, offering a seat on the initial board (which is later filled meritocratically) for any organization willing to put 10 resources to work on the project. For the initial board, that list is Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat, and SUSE.
I got involved in this because the project’s technical director, Carl Trieloff, called on our Community Architecture and Leadership team to help with community scaffolding for the launch and beyond. Since then I’ve been building the ovirt.org website, setting up the communications, creating and filling the wiki, helping with the source repository, starting an open services infrastructure team so all community members can help, and organizing this workshop with Robyn Bergeron.
So this is what I’ve been up to, which I really should have been writing about, but … ah, life.