----- 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],
> [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Thursday, 4 October, 2012 2:53:01 AM
> Subject: Re: The opposite SL and VirtualBox problem
> 
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:59 PM, David Sommerseth
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Joseph Areeda" <[log in to unmask]>
> >> To: [log in to unmask]
> >> Cc: [log in to unmask]
> >> Sent: Tuesday, 2 October, 2012 10:51:52 PM
> >> Subject: Re: The opposite SL and VirtualBox problem
> >>
> >> Well, I'm not going to touch Nico's comment because I don't know
> >> KVM.
> >>
> >> For me it's the Devil you know kind of thing.  I've had good
> >> experience
> >> with Vbox on multiple OS and am just playing in my comfort zone.
> >>
> >> I do have reasons to explore other VMs but none of them pressing.
> >>  I
> >> just want to install one of the University's "free" site license
> >> copy
> >> of
> >> Windows as a courtesy to our students.
> >
> > Even though Nico have some good points, I feel some of them are
> > also dated due to the shape of virt-manager in earlier versions.
> >  In EL6.3, it's become quite good IMO and very usable.  If you're
> > running KVM locally on your own computer, there would be no
> > benefits of using vbox IMO.
> 
> What do you find improved? I'm writing a new KVM setup guideline for
> complete "newbies" on an open source project, and would welcome your
> insights. I did a 6.3 based installation today and found no
> significant improvementn in the virt-manager itself.

I've been playing with virt-manager since Fedora 11 (maybe even a little bit in Fedora 8/9-ish) and RHEL5, so that's my background.  And from that perspective, I can now easily through virt-manager create a new network bridge [1], setup LVM controlled storage pools (or adding iSCSI based disks [2], making the iSCSI layer invisible to the KVM guest) and create new VMs using the virt-manager configured network bridge and storage pool (including allocating a logical volume in the storage pool's volume group).  I have all OSes downloaded as ISO images and saved them under /var/lib/libvirt/images and uses the ISO install from that directory.  Or I can mount these ISO images and provide them via a locally configured http server and use the network install.  And I do all this via the virt-manager.  I've not played much with the "Virtual Network" feature, but from what I can see, it should be fairly straight forward to also configure that - as either a closed, NATed or routed network, where libvirt configures dnsmasq automatically if you want DHCP on the virtual network.

To set up the network and storage pools, I right click on the "localhost" entry in virt-manager and click on "Details".  The VM installation is done using the "Create new VM wizard", just filling out the fields.  And VM management is done double clicking the VMs.  So to answer your question, in the early days, all this was cumbersome and didn't always work.  In SL6.3, I have no troubles doing this at all, It Just Works.  So I struggle to understand your criticism of the virt-manager functionality (from a GUI perspective).  It might be I'm blind to those issues you see, as I've had my fights earlier and which I don't have any more.

So it almost feels like it is not doing it the way you want it to work, to which I can't add much.


kind regards,

David Sommerseth


[1] If adding VLAN and bridges to the mix, you need to manually add "VLAN=yes" to the ifcfg-eth* file virt-manager creates of the eth device.  Then creating the bridge afterwords will allow you to complete the setup without issues.  That's the only issue I've hit in virt-manager in my last tests.

[2] <http://berrange.com/posts/2010/05/04/provisioning-kvm-virtual-machines-on-iscsi-with-qnap-virt-manager-part-2-of-2/>