[virt-tools-list] Suggestions about Virt-manager

[Cole Robinson]

On 08/03/2009 05:00 AM, axel_xia at sohu.com wrote:
> Hi, dear virt-tools development team,
> I am one of the Fedora fans in China and really feel amazing to experience this fantastic virt-manager tool. However, I think some areas can be improved in future, so could you mind if I made some proposals/suggestions?

Feedback is always appreciated!

> 1) Is that possible to make it details for the documentation in virt-manager website & in the software help? And if common users know how to contribute on this software, lots of people (including I) are willing to do some work such as translation/localization etc. This wonderful software deserves much more popular useage than current situation, but apparently the instructions (for example, establish & use guest OS step-by-step instructure) had become the obstacles for its widely spread.

Documentation, and the usefulness of the website, are big problems right
now. In the past year, we've added or rewrote tons of the UI, which
isn't explicitly documented anywhere (though it should be easy to just
use). Contribution documentation is a part of this.

> 2) Can we add more features that are currently exisiting in virtualbox & vmware workstation? For example, a tool bar/menu still can not be hidden when in full-screen mode; 

Yeah, we definitely need to provide a 'real' fullscreen mode.

no shared folder (I know SAMBA can share files between guest & host
OS, but most of users don't know how);

Good idea, just not sure how to easily handle it in a hypervisor
agnostic manner, and for regular users. I know qemu/kvm supports a
simple samba mode, but I think it's an ugly hack (and libvirt doesn't
support it).

 no utility / seamless feature (lots of virtualbox / vmware users really
love that feature!);

This is a cool feature, but I think would require a lot of work at the
hypervisor level (and possibly special tools inside the guest? not
sure), so certainly won't happen in the short term.

 and only English version of this software available.......

There are numerous translations of virt-manager available (with varying
degrees of up to date). Maybe your particular language hasn't had a
translation yet?

> 3) Another suggestion for enterprise application.Let me firstly tell you some suitation in my company: The high & stable performance workstation are needed in the department of Computer-Aided-Design/Engineering/Manufacturing(CAD/CAE/CAM), so the Linux-based Solaris workstation are commonly used by some employees. However, the engineers still need to communicate with other Windows users via XP. For those employees, the company allocated 2 computers (sharing a same display LCD) to them. They firstly complete CAD/CAE/CAM work in Solaris workstation, then switch to another computer with XP installed to tranfer files to colleages via FTP (Hummingbird). Oh, MY GOD! 
> What if the KVM/Virt-manager will be installed in the workstation? What if the virt-manager runs very fast & smoothly & stably with the feature of "virtualbox seamless / vmware unitily" function? The answer is: the linux users will really "seamlessly" do their work between Windows XP & Linux and even they themselves do not feel in 2 different OS! And the company will no longer to buy another set of hardware with XP installed for Linux users any more!

Even though this is an enterprise use case, this is really desktop virt
(as opposed to server management). Going forward, our main focus is to
improve virt-manager in the desktop case, so hopefully this will get
easier with each release.

Thanks,
Cole