[Libvir] feature sujestions

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 02:41:57PM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 12:41:22PM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> >  
> >>Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >>Some distributed stuff to complement the remote features above:   
> >>Cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) integration with virt-manager for 
> >>being able to graphically pick what profile the user wants to install 
> >>from a list of remote boot servers.   (There's an XMLRPC API for this), 
> >>and also ways to configure the boot server from a simple GTK app (not 
> >>part of virt-manager).      This could be of use where people want to 
> >>roll out configurations that someone else has set up for them, but they 
> >>are not comfortable with the command line tools.   Perhaps it would be 
> >>possible to export a set of virt-manager settings to Cobbler for reuse 
> >>by virt-manager users on other machines.
> >>    
> >
> >   I agree we need something along those lines, and IMHO if they are more
> >comfortable using point and click, I guess they would also prefer have
> >automatic discovery of where cobbler was installed. Do we have (or could
> >add) avahi support for discovery of the service.
> 
> Added a few days ago upstream, yes (0.6.1 candidate). You have to 
> install avahi-tools, it's not a hard RPM requires, but if it's there, 
> cobbler will publish as "cobblerd".

  Excellent, the discovery problem is the usual bootstrap one which 
really confuses the users !

> > If most install options
> >could be centralized (think like an automatic setup template based for
> >example on the user LDAP info), provisioning for a new user could come
> >as simple an UI as:
> >    "A centralized setting si available, pick one of the OSes"
> >      "Fedora 7"
> >      "Fedora 6"
> >      "Centos 5"
> >      ...
> >  
> Right now Cobbler is all hierarchial (distros -> profiles -> systems) 
> and there's a XMLRPC API. So you could have a drop down "pick your 
> distro" and then be
> able to pick your profile under the distro. You could optionally be able 
> to pick a system definition (which includes a MAC address) to deploy but 
> it would fine
> to leave that out if it didn't make sense.

  okay

> >maybe even the processor count and memory size could be defaulted
> >from the centalized profiles.
> >Yes you can do this already from the CLI, but being able to make it
> >trivial and integrated in the virtmanager GUI, would probably make a 
> >big difference in usability.
> >  
> 
> Yep, I like this.
> 
> A good way to fine defaults for each distro would be to see if there is 
> a default profile named after the distro, which is what "cobbler import"
> creates today if you feed it a DVD or rsync mirror. Or they could 
> optionally pick another profile, and have the option of refining choices 
> either way.

  Sounds good,

Daniel

-- 
Red Hat Virtualization group http://redhat.com/virtualization/
Daniel Veillard      | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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