[virt-tools-list] virt-manager needs finishing polish

[Cole Robinson]

On 01/23/2010 03:31 AM, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> Hi,
> After posting my initial blog post
> (http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/index.php/archives/fedora-virtualization-has-rough-edges/)
> and through discussion in comments and also in reported bugs I saw the
> great potential of virt-manager on Fedora as desktop virtualization
> tool that could replace likes of VMWare and VirtualBox but it needed
> some UI and usability polish.
> 
> Please take use case of installing Fedora or Ubuntu in virt-manager as
> benchmarks or ease of use for new users. How easy/hard is it to
> install Fedora/Ubuntu as virtual machines in virt-manager? Any install
> issues? How well do they work? Etc...
> 
> I covered some of that in my previously mentioned blog post and came
> to some later what would make virt-manager easier to use.
> After looking more deeply in virt-manager it UI indeed looks a bit
> clunky and assumes you are familiar with the way it works, not user
> friendly for new users.
> 
> For new users of virt-manager it would be great if somehow more
> emphasized in UI is done on explaining that there are these things
> called "storage pools" and also that there are two storage pools by
> default; one in /var and other in /home directory.
> 

The 'storage pool' concept, and how libvirt handles storage in general, can
definitely be exposed to the user better via virt-manager. For the desktop
user case, they really shouldn't even need to know much about it. Setting up a
default pool in /home is what we want to eventually do, but it isn't the best
fit for the system wide libvirt connection (using qemu:///system), which is
what we are largely forced to use at the moment.

Current our desktop story is weak, largely because we don't yet have a good
way to allow users to run the qemu binary as their user (using the
qemu:///session libvirt connection).

The main hurdle for using qemu:///session is that we need root privs to give
proper network access. There have been several ideas about how to do this, but
nothing is implemented yet. Once this problem is solved, a whole class of
issues disappears: many permissions problems (can libvirtd and qemu access my
install media), current sound issues, prompting for root passwd in
virt-manager, etc.

> Fedora community has educated me to put any suggestions as
> constructive as possible and I did that in two RFEs and hope they are
> seeded in fertile soil and that developers see opportunity to improve
> usability of virt-manager
> 
> Here are two RFEs, please comment on them:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557103
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557107
> 

There are some good suggestions in your RFEs, but truthfully they are a bit
broad. Titling a bug 'Better and more logical storage pool defaults' and
'Better UI storage management' are fairly abstract requests. I would recommend
combining your two bug reports since they are on fairly similar topics,
clearly pointing out your concrete suggestions.

I do agree that this piece of virt-manager needs rethinking.

Thanks,
Cole