oVirt initiatives

[Shu Ming]

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.
>
>


-- 
Shu Ming <shuming at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
IBM China Systems and Technology Laboratory