[et-mgmt-tools] virt-manager roadmap

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 03:58:42AM +0100, Florian Heigl wrote:
> 2007/2/27, Hugh Brock <hbrock at redhat.com>:
> >All: I have just posted a new virt-manager roadmap at
> >http://virt-manager.org/roadmap.html. It reflects our discussions with
> >Fujitsu last week along with other features various developers and
> >clients have requested. Please feel free to comment here on the list, or
> >post patches to the roadmap as necessary.
> 
> I desparately miss simultanously connecting to multiple Xen hosts.

This is probably the single biggest item on the roadmap - so big in fact
that we've split it up into many tasks. To do remote managemnet 'right'
is no easy task. First we have to make sure we're portable to any virt
platform (Xen, KVM, QEMU, etc), so we don't want to simply use the Xen
specific remote API - instead we're working on a libvirt daemon to provide
remote management service for all libvirt backends. Security is incredibly
important too - no existing remote maangement API for Xen is secure - they
all assume you're tunnelling over SSH which isn't really a viable solution
for large scale deployment. Thus we're making sure libvirt daemon uses
TLS encryption & certificate authentication (same security model as used
in web servers/browsers). Then there's the quesiton fo the remote console -
VNC is not a secure protocol in its regular impl, so we're working to
make QEMU, Xen paravirt framebugger, and the virt-manager VNC widget all
support a TLS security extension for VNC. Storage & network management
is also an important thing that needs addressing - we can't simply
enumerate local devices / create files when managing remote hosts.

We're working on all these problems & more in parallel, and if all  goes
to plan, come Fedora 8 we'll have a complete remote management solution
for virt-manager with end-to-end TLS security for every component. Some
bits may well be ready before Fedora 8, and if so we'll push updates out
to Fedora 6 / 7 to let people leverage new capabilities as easily as possible.

Regards,
Dan.
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