[Users] What do you want to see in oVirt next?

Mon Jan 7 14:04:17 UTC 2013

A general +1 for every point basically. Very good and thought through points. The ones I like the most are:

* Spice client- and plugin for Firefox on Windows and Ubuntu
* Preferrably working through both Admin- and User(customer) portal;)
* Guest Agent for Windows. Most of our VMs are Win2008- and R2, 2012's are coming too.
* Host Profiles would be a time saver
* Resource Pools
* Clone VM's
* Resizing VM disks from GUI
* Upload ISO's from GUI
* Integrate virt-v2v into GUI
* Edit VM settings before import

Also I would like to make a wish of my own:
* Time-share scheduling.
- The ability to "rent out" resources available only during N window of time for different groups of users. Our users tend to only need resource capacity in batches, crunching their numbers or whatnot during an intence period of time and can be quiet for a while, then come back for some more. That´s why I would like to see an interface where we as an organization could pool together our metal into oVirt and then together sit down and schedule it so that everyone gets their pice of the cake, so to speak. E.g. Group X rents 64 vCPU's and 4TB RAM from 20130601 to 20130801, during which time they are guaranteed those resources, and then those machines will expire and be automatically deleted, freeing up those resources again. Something like that would make collaboration between our different groups much easier.

Best Regards and Happy New Year!
/Karli Sjöberg

fre 2013-01-04 klockan 12:11 +0100 skrev René Koch (ovido):

Hi,

First of all thanks for starting this discussion.

My feedback is mainly based on RHEV, as I'm using RHEV in our company
and on customer side. oVirt is cool as I can see what new features next
RHEV version may/will bring and what issues other users have with this
technology.

What I like:
* web based UI
* KVM as it brings the highest virtualization performance on the market
* RHEL/Fedora as a hypervisor for more flexibility
* tags and bookmarks with search filters - great for big installations
* server and desktop virtualization can be done with one gui
* open source of course ;)
* hook scripts - sooo cool!
* rest-api
* user portal - some of our customers use this as a basic cloud tool for
providing vms and self-provisioning features with accounting using
postgresql database

What I would like to see in future release in oVirt and after testing in
RHEV (most of these points are based on customer feedback, too, who
bought RHEV or where we had at least a pre-sales appointment):

* Spice-XPI for Firefox on Windows (and maybe Ubuntu):
I know it's a lot of work to build it for every new firefox version, but
providing it for Firefox LTS would be a really good start. At the moment
Internet Explorer ist required for full use of admin und user portal (or
VNC has to be used).

* ovirt-guest-agents for major Linux distributions:
- openSUSE
- SLES
- Ubuntu
- Debian

* Virtualize ovirt-engine on ovirt hosts
I know that this would require major changes due to how oVirt works
(libvirt and vdsm), but nearly every customers is asking: why can't I
install my hypervisors, create a vm for RHEV manager and configure the
environment then (in the same way as it is possible with VMware)?

* Make ovirt-engine more Enterprise ready
Compared with VMware (sorry for always comparing it with VMware, but
it's the market leader and it has many nice features which would be
great in oVirt/RHEV, too) oVirt required more tasks done on command line
or via API/Shell/GUI as features are missing in the web GUI:

- Deploy network configs on all hosts
When creating a new logical network in a Cluster it has to be created on
all hosts before it can be used. It would be great if this could be done
automatically (except for rhevm/spice/storage-networks where an IP
address of each host is required). The workflow could be:
+ create new logical network
+ click on deploy button
+ create ifcfg-files on hosts
+ make ifcfg-files persistent on ovirt Nodes
+ bring interface up
+ check if interfaces are up
+ make logical network Operational if deployment was successful on all
hosts

- Configure ovirt hosts from GUI
It would be really an improvement if all settings of the TUI (like DNS,
NTP, syslog, kdump, admin and root passwords, hostname,...) could be
configured in ovirt-engine gui, too (in hosts tab). Plus including
changing multipath.conf in Web GUI would be very nice.

- Create host profiles
Storing all configuration settings of the TUI and host tab (without ip
addresses for sure) in a profile would make changes easier and speed up
deployment of new hypervisors. I'm thinking of:
+ create a profile which contains e.g. DNS, NTP and admin passwords
+ link profile to hosts
+ change DNS in profile
+ in hosts tab you can see that there are changes between the profile
and the hosts
+ bring host in maintenance mode
+ sync profile (and maybe reboot host)
When installing new hosts (via CD or PXE) the profile can be used to
automatically configure the host without providing all settings via boot
options + configure all networks, custom multipath.conf,... Host profile
should be used for full RHEL/Fedora hosts as well.

- Update RHEL/Fedora Hypervisors from GUI
It would be nice if Fedora hosts could be updated from the ovirt-engine
GUI like the ovirt Node. Running yum check-update on host and displaying
notice if there are updates available.

- Implement resource pools
At the moment only Quotas are available (which is great, btw), but in
some cases it's necessary to implement resource pools. E.g. Limit CPU,
Memory and Network for group of test vms, but give full resources to
production vms. This could be done with cgroups.

- Clone vms
I'm missing the possibility of cloning vms without creating a template.

- Resize disk in GUI
Increasing the size of a disk would help a lot. At the moment I create
new disks and put it into volume group on vm, but resizing would be
nicer in some cases and will reduce the number of disks.

- Upload ISOs within the GUI to ISO domain

- Integrate virt-v2v into oVirt GUI
It would be cool if VMs could be Migrated from other systems within the
GUI using virt-v2v as a backend.

- Edit settings of vms before importing them
Most the of the settings like disk type (IDE/VirtIO), nic but also vm
type (server/desktop) and access protocol (Spice/VNC) can't be edited
withing oVirt/RHEVM GUI before importing them. These settings can only
be changed by editing the xml directly. Disk type and nic is risky of
course, but working for most Linux distributions.

- Use existing share for ISO domain
When creating an ISO domain, oVirt/RHEV creates it's own directory
structure with IDs. It would be nice if an existing share could be used
(e.g. an ISO share on NFS server which is used by other service, too)
without creating the structure with IDs. I know that the IDs are needed
internally but I think it should be possible to reuse an existing share.

- Put ISO domain on NFS, iSCSI, FC and Gluster storage, too

I know that these are a lot of features I would like to see and it would
be great if some of them would be implemented in future releases.

Btw, on of the coolest features of oVirt seems to be the UI plugin
feature, which I haven't tested yet. I really hope that this will be
available in RHEV 3.2, too.

As I don't have that much Java knowledge to implement some of my feature
requests and contribute the code, I can do some Perl and JavaScript and
extend oVirt (and hopefully RHEV, too) like Oved did with Foreman (great
job and many thanks for the documentation in your wiki!).

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