The history of oVirt is an interesting story. In the beginning, the oVirt project was created by Red Hat, which open-sourced a product that was obtained through the Qumranet acquisition. From this open-source project, Red Hat built a product and made it available to customers as Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).
The oVirt project is governed by a board that initially included all the members of the Open Virtualization Alliance, including Red Hat, Cisco, Suse, IBM, Canonical, Intel, and NetApp. Over the years, the original members of the board have resigned, leaving only Red Hat as the main contributor to the project and one other original board member, who moved to Caltech.
Last year, Red Hat published an update to the RHV product life cycle, announcing its end of life in August 2026, with OpenShift Virtualization as its successor. But as a commercial software product, RHV has a different prioritization from oVirt, which is and will always be a community project. To be clear, while there will be an End of Life for RHV, there is no planned End of Life for oVirt.
The Red Hat team working in oVirt has started to open up the oVirt project to be more accessible to other contributors:
- oVirt project development has moved to a more widely accepted platform: GitHub
- The release process for shipping oVirt builds is being adjusted to ship new releases using widely supported community systems such as Fedora COPR and CentOS CBS.
- The development team has started a peering program for anyone interested in playing an active role in oVirt community, to make onboarding as easy as possible
- The development team has actively reached out to Linux distributions derived from the CentOS stream to start engaging them (CentOS provides the Community Build System for Virtualization SIG).
So, what is the future of the oVirt project? This depends on how you, the community, shape it! Come help contribute to this new future!
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