[Users] What are you looking for from oVirt?

[Robert Middleswarth]

On 06/13/2012 10:28 AM, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> That is a grand subject for my first "proper" email to the Users list, 
> and it definitely needs some context! So let me introduce myself.
>
> My name is Dave Neary, and I recently started working for a group 
> which is being formed inside Red Hat called OSAS (open source and 
> standards). The role of my group is to help make any open source 
> projects that Red Hat works in successful, and I would really like to 
> help take oVirt to the next level in terms of adoption and contribution.
>
> One of the things I'm still figuring out is what the natural audience 
> for oVirt is, and what you all like about oVirt, and would like to see 
> improved. Based on that, I would like to propose areas we as a 
> community can concentrate on related to the product, the website, and 
> our marketing and promotion, but the first step is still to get a 
> better idea what the target audience for oVirt is, and should be.
>
> So - how are you using oVirt?
Right now we are testing it.  Running the engine in a vmware guest and 
have 2 servers to act as nodes.  Looking at a way to replace VMware.

> Why did you choose it over alternatives?
Open Stack requires much larger clusters and is more cloud then data 
center in it design.  Most of the other projects I have looked at are 
either designed to be AWS clones or designed for extreme flexibility 
making then very hard to use (Open Nebula)

> What do you like about it?
Web interface is simple and fairly easy to work with.  Has some really 
nice feature built in like live migrations flexable in the hardware it 
works with (Compared to Xen and it CPU must be almost exactly the same).
> and what would you like to see change, whether that is in terms of 
> technical, process, or marketing changes?
I would like to see the project move away from its RHEV/RHEL roots some 
more.

Example:

When started a VM you have a choice of a dozen windows / rhel versions 
and Other Linux NO choices for Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, or other 
Linux based systems.  It makes since for RHEV since those are the only 
OS they official support but ovirt wants to run on other OS it should at 
least start with something visiable like this.

The guest agent only exist for Windows, RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS 
(Someone outside the project created).  Where is the agents for Debian 
based ones?  Or even a list of requirement to build the agents?  If it 
exists someone please point me to it.

The really isn't a clear index on the wiki stuff is all over the place.  
Features pages that are added when development starts but most of the 
time no one updates them when the feature is implemented or changes are 
commited.

> I'm here to help, but to do so I need your help first!
>
> Please feel free to reply to me on-list (if you'd like to start 
> discussion) or off-list (if you'd like your feedback to be more 
> discrete). Any feedback at all will be helpful.
>
> Thank you very much - I look forward to hearing from as many of you as 
> possible.
>
> Regards,
> Dave.
>
> PS. I'm still figuring out proper mailing list etiquette for this 
> project - I've added board@ and arch@ to CC since I expect our work to 
> have project-wide consequences, but it's more to keep people informed 
> at this point. Please let me know off-list if I'm doing something I 
> shouldn't!
>
Thanks
Robert