----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: "David Sommerseth" <[log in to unmask]>
> Cc: "Joseph Areeda" <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tuesday, 2 October, 2012 1:53:29 PM
> Subject: Re: The opposite SL and VirtualBox problem
> 
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:15 AM, David Sommerseth
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

[...snip...]

> When I am on a remote connection with limited bandwidth, and I need
> to
> add or modify hardware configurations for a VM, I *do not want* to
> have to run the graphics console of the VM simply in order to add a
> network port. The virt-manager tool got this *dead wrong*.

Well, I might be quite used to work with low-level stuff.  But I find 'virsh' quite handy to work with when just using ssh to my KVM host.  And when I wonder about anything, this resource provides the info I need to figure out things:

<http://libvirt.org/sources/virshcmdref/html-single/>

Otherwise, I've set up libvirt to be accessible over a TCP port, with authentication.  So I use a local running instance of virt-manager, managing a remote KVM host.  And it doesn't even really have to be the same version for general functionality.  Even though, installing a new OS have been a bit annoying (unless doing networked installs)

> Oh, and did I forget to mention that if your X setup is not just
> right, "virt-manager" fails to start completely silently? It doesn't
> evem check if your "DISPLAY" is set and send an appropriate error
> message?

Agreed, that's annoying.

> KVM also has very serious problems with network configuration. The
> necessary "bridged" network configuration for VM's that are not going
> to be behind a NAT or completely isolated is not actually supported
> by
> any of our upstream vendor's configuration tools. You have to hand
> edit your core network configuration files with a text editor, and
> any
> use of NetworkManager to manage VPN  or wireless connections puts you
> at risk of breaking it unless you very rigorously and manually put
> 'NM_CONTROLLED=no' in each /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*
> file.

It's a while since I tried to set up this.  And last time, I needed VLAN's as well, so that required manually tweaking things even more.  But I know it used to be like that.  I haven't really tried it with the latest 6.3 release.

> It is a very, very steep learning curve to get your first KVM setups
> working, where with VirtualBox it's very plug and play. VirtualBox is
> unlikely to have the high scalability, live server migration, or
> kernel integration that KVM has, but for a casual virtual machine or
> two running common operating systems on common architectures, who
> cares?

It used to be hard to setup KVM.  Maybe I'm just gotten so used to the process, but I find it quite intuitive mostly these days.  And the docs have also improved.  Anyhow, I'm also quite sure the libvirt guys wouldn't mind patches from users fixing their itches as well ... as you mentioned you did some coding, I mean.


kind regards,

David Sommerseth