[Users] Agents for Windows

[Bob Doolittle]

On 12/06/2013 06:25 AM, Vinzenz Feenstra wrote:
>> On 12/06/2013 05:33 AM, Blaster wrote:
>>
>> I guess I'm confused as to how Red Hat can be making statements that 
>> Ovirt is a viable alternative to ESXi when many simple things that 
>> ESXi users take for granted simply don't work or are non-existent 
>> under Ovirt.  I'm hardly a power user of ESXi, and I've only begun my 
>> Ovirt journey, but I've already come across the following:
...
> I understand that you're disappointed and we're trying to make our 
> best to make the user experience better. You should be considering the 
> age of the project and what we're actually already providing. Yes not 
> everything is perfect, but we're working hard on improving it.

True but you'll note that Blaster's overall comments were about Red 
Hat's marketing of this project as a solution, given it's status. I 
agree that it's a bit premature. oVirt is maturing quickly, but it still 
has a ways to go. It will get there, as you point out, and of course 
driving demand by a little over-enthusiastic marketing may actually 
accelerate that process, which may be a goal (Machiavelli would approve 
:). It will also frustrate some users, unfortunately.

> Another thing having to say about your point 4 is that you're basing 
> your experience solely on Windows guests, which are a bit more 
> troublesome to support the same way we do for example Linux guests.

Here I disagree. My experience is the opposite. You can get almost 
everything (that I care about anyway) for Windows by installing 
spice-guest-tools (once you find it - there are few clues on the oVirt 
Wiki). This includes drivers, better mouse/display handling, and 
copy/paste. It does not seem however to include communication of the IP 
address (nor, I suspect, clean shutdown handling).

It's on Linux where you have to piece together more things, and in fact 
have to build some things (e.g. vdagent) from source.

Once https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1026933 is fixed 
(currently slated for 3.3.3 :( ), and assuming that a VFD will be 
included and not just an ISO, the experience will be much simpler for 
Windows than for Linux for those pieces.

If we were to build vdagent for Linux and make the RPMs for it and the 
Linux Guest Agent available in an easy way (incorporate them into an ISO 
and pre-populate ISO_DOMAIN with it?) that would be a big step forward 
for Linux guests. It's possible that you'd have to build vdagent from 
source, using some kind of automated build/install script on the ISO, to 
make it work for a variety of Linux distros. That's effectively what 
VMware has done. When building from source I find resolving the 
dependencies to be a big headache, particularly on Fedora.

-Bob