[Ovirt-devel] Lighter-weight "developer" setup

[David Lutterkort]

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 16:09 +0200, Chris Lalancette wrote:
> The basic premise here is that we want to make it easier for people with limited
> amounts of hardware to get up and running with oVirt, and hopefully build a
> bigger community around oVirt.  We've come a long way with the developer
> appliance + the fake managed nodes, but that only gets you so far.  In
> particular, you can't really start guests (you can, but they are extremely
> slow), and the appliance is quite big to download (especially in far-away
> places, or with slower internet connections).

Expanding on what Bryan mentioned, the first step to this should be to
express the setup of the oVirt appliance as puppet manifests, since that
will give you a lot of flexibility in all the possible permutations that
people might want for a setup. Besides that, there's a few more
benefits:

      * rebasing to different OS versions becomes easier (possible ?)
        since we'd have to make a clear distinction between 'base
        appliance' (think JeOS) and 'oVirt personalization'. That's one
        of the big reason why our IT folks came up with genome and
        discarded an image-based approach to setting their
        infrastructure up.
      * developers get a much more controlled ways to keep their
        appliance in sync with development in git - no need to manually
        figure out how changes to various files need to be translated
        into changes on their appliance.

If we had manifests for the managed node, too, it would also be very
easy to pull the pertinent pieces out of it and turn those manifests
into manifests that people need to run on their preinstalled host.

David