[et-mgmt-tools] virt-manager features and roadmap tentative draft

[Hugh Brock]

Red Hat team members had a meeting this week to look at the work ahead 
for virt-manager. Based on our own thoughts and a list of outside 
requests, we came up with this tentative roadmap for Fedora 7 and Fedora 
8. We'd like to hear from the community on additional features and 
modifications to these as well.

Features        	when		Issues
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Qemu and KVM backends	Fedora 7	Will need libvirt support
OS profiles		Fedora 7	Should be able to select an OS
					type when installing a full-virt
					guest, so we can pass
					appropriate boot parameters
					(acpi on/off for example).
Mouse pointer in
   console for PV 	Fedora 7	Already works in rawhide for
					RHEL5 and Fedora 6 guests, with
					configuration.
Drop-down lists for PV
  installs		Fedora 7	We would like to prepopulate the
					PV kernel source lists with some
					sensible URLs. Problem: mirror
					selection?
Group operations	Fedora 7	We would like to be able to
					select multiple guests at once
					for certain operations
					(shutdown, for example).
UI for block/net devs	Fedora 7	We need UI for adding vbds and
					vnics to guests. Support for
					this is already available in
					libvirt
XML output		Fedora 7	We would like to be able to
					write the libvirt guest config
					XML to a file, for export to
					other tools
Connect help button	Fedora 7	We need help text for all of the
					virt-manager screens
Crash-dump button	Fedora 7	Would like to have UI for
					crashing a guest and storing the
					crash dump somewhere. Support
					for this is already available in
					libvirt

Managing multiple			Requires libvirt remote mgmt
   remote hosts				support
  * connect dialog	Fedora 8	Needs some UI for remote
					authentication/authorization
  * manager window	Fedora 8	Should display hosts/guests
					in a tree or something similar,
					rather than the current simple
					list
  * VNC widget
    performance 		Fedora 8	The Python vnc code runs too
					slowly to be usable when
					connecting over a network pipe.
					We need to replace it with a C
					widget.
  * VNC widget auth
    and encrypt		Fedora 8	The connection from the VNC
					widget to the remote console
					needs to be secured and
					authenticated


Dogtail tests		Fedora 8	We need a full set of UI tests
					now that the UI is somewhat
					stabilized.

Of course the schedule above is tentative, and we may well try to do 
more. There is also some effort to be put into fixing bugs. If you have 
any comments or requests for either the Fedora 7 or Fedora 8 time frame, 
please share them here!

Many thanks,
--Hugh

--
Red Hat Virtualization Group http://redhat.com/virtualization
Hugh Brock		| virt-manager http://virt-manager.org
hbrock at redhat.com	| virtualization library http://libvirt.org