Re: oVirt initiatives

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.

> > 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. > >