Hi, On 09/11/2012 11:33 PM, Jason Brooks wrote:

Right now, oVirt only works with Fedora and CentOS/RHEL. We shouldn't give people the wrong idea about multi-distro possibilities. Someone could get the engine app running on jboss on a different platform, but vdsm, an essential component for doing anything w/ ovirt, is very much tied to fedora/el right now.

While I accept that this is the current situation, I think we definitely want to give people the impression on the website that this is not a Red Hat only virtualisation manager - yes, there's work to be done to integrate it on other distros, but we are more than happy to integrate that work, and we plan on doing it ourselves for Ubuntu in the near future. The message "we welcome people who want to run other distros as oVirt nodes" is important. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Community Action and Impact Open Source and Standards, Red Hat Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13

On 09/11/2012 11:33 PM, Jason Brooks wrote:

This looks very nice, Garrett.

Thanks!

Some comments/thoughts:

The minimum RAM for ovirt is 4GB. You can get by with less, but the engine-setup script won't run if it detects less RAM. There is a command line argument, --no-mem-check, that disables the minimum memory check.

Thanks for the correction! It was a placeholder to express the desire for minimum requirements on that page — but accuracy even on mockups is a great thing, so I'm modifying them now. Do you know the other requirements too? Such as hard disk space, etc. — or anything I might be leaving out…?

If we're going for simplicity, we may want to go with the ovirt-engine-setup-plugin-allinone as the suggested package to install. This way, you come out of these directions ready to create and run VMs. For a complete setup, it may be that the steps required are too many to include on this page. We could link to the quick start guide here: http://wiki.ovirt.org/wiki/Quick_Start_Guide.

That's the intent of the original download mockup: http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/mockup-1/download.html & Info: http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/background-info/design-downlo... From my understanding, it'll take effort from multiple people to get the all-in-one install ISO working how we want it to. The goal of the download-alt mockup was to make sure we can move forward with the website and still launch in the near future, even if the all-in-one ISO isn't quite yet ready. (Hopefully we can move to the fully packaged version soon, as I think it's conceptually friendlier to those installing oVirt.)

Right now, oVirt only works with Fedora and CentOS/RHEL. We shouldn't give people the wrong idea about multi-distro possibilities.

Agreed. That's why I focused on using Fedora in both download page mockups and added a plea-for-help. When other OSes are 100% *fully* supported in an all-in-one install ISO, we could then (perhaps) add some way to switch the page when we're comfortable enough that they work. Until that time, I firmly believe having a recommended install path with links to secondary support is fine.

Someone could get the engine app running on jboss on a different platform, but vdsm, an essential component for doing anything w/ ovirt, is very much tied to fedora/el right now.

For the time being, "other distros" just means having the management UI running on various platforms, and that everyone using oVirt is using Fedora/RHEL/RHEL-derivative doing the heavy lifting on the servers, right? What's the general plan & timeframe for getting VDSM et al. working cross-distro, so that all of oVirt can run everywhere? Garrett

On 09/12/2012 08:17 PM, Jason Brooks wrote:

This is different from ISO

Aha, okay. That's also great, and it's probably a requirement for an all-in-one installer that would allow someone to download just one ISO to install: A) All of oVirt (this would be the default) B) The server part ("node") C) The web-based management UI (Another approach could be to _always_ install everything on each machine, and oVirt could run in one of the above modes.)

...

What's the general plan & timeframe for getting VDSM et al. working cross-distro, so that all of oVirt can run everywhere?

I don't know the plan -- it'd be good to have a "things needed to enable multi-distro" page on the wiki. I'll try to start one.

Great idea! Garrett

On 09/12/2012 03:18 PM, Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden wrote:

First of all, I do like the new design.

= Navigation = Should the navigation label be different from the page header? I do like 'get started', maybe more than 'download'. OTOH, getting started might be ambigous because a user has a different starting point than a developer. Perhaps this is no issue because there's already a develop link as well.

The navigation definitely should have the word "download". People look for that. It's a keyword/buzzword that is in common usage, and pretty much everyone looks for that. It's a bit of a trick, however... as our goal isn't that people simply _download_ oVirt, but to get it working and to have oVirt be useful for them. That's why that page's focus is so much more than just downloading oVirt, despite it being named that in the heading. The previous mockup[1] did make it super-obvious when it comes to downloading oVirt. An all-in-one installer enables us to do that. (Basically: "Here's *the thing* you download and do something with. Click the button to start.") Right now, oVirt isn't technically ready for that, so there's no real way to make it clear to download something. (Hopefully that'll be resolved soon?) Our primary goals for someone downloading and installing oVirt are: 1) Successfully install oVirt 2) Have oVirt be useful 3) Get those happy with oVirt to participate in some ways (which usually isn't possible, unless they already meet goals 1 & 2) [1] Here's the first mockup, which highlights downloading (and I think is more ideal): http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/mockup-1/download.html and thoughts behind its design: http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/background-info/design-downlo...

= Alignment of numbers = Right now they're not in the center and that kind of drives me insane ;)

It's a stylistic sort of thing. The numbers are aligned to the baseline of the lines of text, but I was trying for something there style-wise. It's not necessarily going to stick, but I kind of dig it for now. Once I get this implemented in an actual web page (and I'm working on that right now, actually), it should be easy to change, so we can play around with various styles.

= Other distros = Personally I love the idea of supporting different distros and we should encourage people to adopt theirs / get a porting effort going. Maybe this page could use a small text with pointers on how to do that? (Though I'm not sure if we currently have such a thing.)

I agree. I tried to address other distributions on both download page mockups now (the alt, which is a compromise for what oVirt is currently like, and the more forward-thinking install-everything ready-to-go single ISO download). In the one, I highlighted other distributions by showing distribution-specific logos clearly on the page. In the other, there are links at the top of the page. When other distributions are supported fully, then we could show them more at a top-level. I strongly feel that we should only highlight fully-working ways of installing oVirt, yet still make it clear that it's possible to get oVirt running at least somewhat on other distributions (and that we want help making it better everywhere). It's my understanding that some people are already making a push to get oVirt better supported elsewhere. Is there anything we could do to make this a bit more obvious on the website? My mockups are designed with the assumption that the links to the plea for help as well as the individual distro download pages all would have information about this. (It can also be mentioned in the community and/or develop main pages too.) If anyone has any ideas to improve this (without getting in the way of making it super-easy to install and use oVirt), I'm very happy to consider them in the designs.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for your feedback! Garrett