On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 7:46 PM, David Sommerseth
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <[log in to unmask]>


>> 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.

DHCP is n issue. If you want to generate new hosts and manage the
DHCP, you really need to start the host, recored the MAC addresses,
and get them into the DHCP reservations. Unfortunately, the wizard
does not deal well with guests that need multiple network ports, at
least to install them from scratch. And adding the new ports is....
awkward  See the note below.

> 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.

Except, the creation of "New" hardware from virt-manager still doesn't
understand the concept of "set up the virtual host, but *don't start
it yet*". The difficulty is that if you need to set up new hosts in
carefully managed switches or DHCP reservations or PXE environments,
you want to know those MAC addresses after configuring the space but
before starting the new host. It's... awkward.

Other exceedingly poor factors include the pop-up screen for
individual guests having "Close" and "Quit" options. Close is fine,
but "Quit" kills hte whole virt-manager session, even if you've got
other consoles open. That's... nasty.

Other options, such as the selection of bridged network ports, should
not be a "look it up elsewhere and type it in" sort of field, they
should be a "what ports is this thing running right now? Let me offer
those as a clickable selection, and manually set ports as an advanced
option, and warn me if I mistype a port name and it doesn't exist."

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

I'm admittedly picky.There were reasons I suggested additional
guidelines to Eric Raymond's essay on open source GUI's, "The Luxury
of Ignorance", and he added them in a postscript to that essay.

> [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.

I strongly suspect you've gotten so used to working with its failures
and limitations you don't even notice them anymore, anymore than I
complain about using "\" for Windows and "/" for Linux to note
directories.