virt-manager vs cli

[Erik Skultety]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 06:28:27AM +0200, vrms wrote:
> I got the impression that the virt-manager does not provide all
> functionality towards managing kvm machines then the virsh cli tool does
> (i.e. towards deleting networks). Is that correct?
> 
> if so, is there any GUI that provides complete access to kvm/qemu/libvirt?

Feature-wise, no, virt-manager doesn't expose every single knob libvirt
supports and there's a very good reason for that - can you imagine how
exhausting, discouraging and potentially very confusing it would be for regular
users to crunch through all the settings? Virt-manager aims at desktop
virtualization where it's unlikely that users will need some advanced tunning
features libvirt supports. However, if you wish to do so anyway, virt-manager
does have an XML editor where you can add the all the advanced settings you
care about.
Take the AMD Secure Virtualization feature for example. It would be great if
virt-manager supported it, but the current state of the technology doesn't
allow us to fully automate the decision process, IOW user intervention
is still required in terms of configuration, so you can't just select
'yes - I want AMD SEV' + the specific settings were overall deemed very complex
and thus unfit for virt-manager's target audience.

If you want GUI that comes the closest in terms of exposing all libvirt
features, you may want to look at oVirt, but beware that running oVirt in a
single-node setup for desktop virtualization is an overkill. Then there's
cockpit (a web interface manager) which is supposed to replace virt-manager in
the future, but IIRC it's about on the same level in terms of libvirt feature
parity as virt-manager, in some areas the former can do more in others less
than the latter, but cockpit is the new shiny thing, so it's being developed
rapidly.

Regards,
Erik