oVirt initiatives

[Itamar Heim]

On 06/24/2012 04:43 PM, Shu Ming wrote:
> On 2012-6-23 1:25, Dave Neary wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> With a number of colleagues and members of the oVirt community, we
>> have been thinking about how we can help oVirt's adoption and increase
>> developer participation and diversity in the project.
>>
>> What we've come up with is a broad definition of the target audience
>> for the project, and a three-phase set of initiatives we believe will
>> help the project be more successful.
>>
>> I'm bringing this to the board list because I would really like your
>> feedback and assistance in helping make this a reality - it's
>> important for me to know that we're proposing things which the project
>> & community think are important.
>>
>>
>> The sample user we discussed (based on feedback from Users and the
>> persona I sent previously was a cost-sensitive sysadmin, potentially
>> looking to move to a KVM-based virtualisation solution, working on a
>> small virtualisation set-up in a test lab environment. He loves open
>> source because it means he can test and deploy it without approval,
>> adoption is bottom-up, and he can tweak it to suit his needs.
>>
>> We want to focus on people who want to download and try it in ~30
>> minutes - running an engine and a node on the same machine
>> (potentially a laptop or desktop machine) and on getting people
>> started with small set-ups - perhaps two nodes and a laptop running
>> the engine.
>
>  From my experience, it is non-trivial and time-consuming to setup an
> working engine with physical nodes attached to it. In order to shorten
> the time for people, I would suggest we can release some images for
> engine, virtual nodes, self-configuring scripts in one package. The
> people who want to try oVirt only need to run a shell command. Then the
> command will deploy the images into right places and start the engine
> and nodes in different virtual machines. A well known IP is assigned to
> the IP for them to access the engine, to create VM in the virtual nodes,
> &etc.
>

that's the purpose of the all-in-one module. have you tried it?

>>
>> Given that target audience and positioning, the three phases we
>> propose are:
>>
>> Phase 1: Web presence
>>
>> We want to review the website and wiki to ensure that the content is
>> appropriate for our target audience, that we're making it easy to
>> adopt oVirt. This will cover the top level navigation, the
>> organisation of information in the website and wiki to make it easy to
>> find, development of new content to focus on the beginner experience
>> (including videos, tutorials, and screenshots). At the end of this,
>> when someone from our core audience comes to the website it should be
>> immediately clear to him that we are offering a solution to a problem
>> he has.
>>
>> We plan to start working on this through the Infra, Users and
>> engine-devel mailing lists (depending on which one is most
>> appropriate) immediately, and complete this work in the next 3 months.
>>
>> Phase 2: Adoption
>>
>> We need packages for all the main Linux distributions. Packaging oVirt
>> for OSes other than Fedora is tricky because of various differences in
>> config file placement, low-level tools and so on. But this must get
>> done, and we'd like for it to be a priority for the project.
>>
>> We also want to help the project with its promotion - both in terms of
>> content on the site, and driving traffic here through conference
>> outreach, articles in tech press, social media and blogs pringing
>> people here via the nice to consume content (videos, tutorials, etc)
>> which we would like to see produced.
>>
>> In addition, we would like to ask for your help in running a set of
>> oVirt meet-ups around the world, with the co-operation of board
>> members, to show oVirt to the people who are interested in it, and
>> prefer a high-touch approach.
>>
>> This will take longer, but we expect to see some movement on this
>> front in the next 6 to 9 months.
>>
>> Phase 3: Expanding the target audience
>>
>> While the low-end user with small virtualisation will help us drive
>> adoption, we also want to help oVirt appeal to a broader audience.
>> We'd like to help do a UX review of the installation and configuration
>> process, and the Engine UI, to make the oVirt experience more pleasant
>> for both limited-hardware users (people using all-in-one in 3.1) and
>> for more sophisticated users. This is a longer term goal, of cours,e
>> but we would like to see the results of this UX review in a future
>> release of oVirt in ~12 to 15 months.
>>
>> Looking forward to your feedback!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dave.
>>
>>
>
>