[Ovirt-devel] A few things (rather long actually)

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 02:32:29PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 06:26:26AM -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >  + related to it, it's really good to have a glossary, use only the 
> >    same terms though the documentation for the same pieces of the
> >    infrastructure. Ideally this should match libvirt terminology
> >    (Node/Hypervisor/Domain), in the graphic I made:
> >     - Console Node: for the physical machine running the WUI appliance
> 
> That's a reasonable choice, or possibly 'Admin node'.
> 
> >     - Cluster Nodes: for the physical barebone machines used to run
> >       the user domains
> 
> The choice of the word 'cluster' is not good - the managed nodes can
> be standalone, or they can be clustered. I prefer 'Managed nodes'.

  Fine by me, just use Node to indicate a physical machine like in libvirt.

> >     - WUI appliance: the domain running the services needed for ovirt
> >       provisionning, authentication and management
> >     - managed domains: for the domains the user actually want to run and
> >       control
> >    those terms are my pick, I find
> >     'oVirt host(s)' and 'oVirt management host' too similar to the point
> >     they are confusing and not matching libvirt own terminology, sorry :-)
> 
> We can add a glossary of terms to the documentation area of the website,
> or even better put it in the wiki so anyone can add entries for things
> they think need explaining.

  hum, maybe the core terms should really go in the doc, actually close to
the architecture diagram would be best i think.

> >  + it's hard to see the requirement for installing my current list so
> >    far is:
> >    - one 64bits machine with an existing OS and KVM support to run the
> >      WUI appliance domain, 2-3 GB available in the root user directory
> >      (Xen based fully virt may work also with tweaking)
> >    - at least one node for the cluster, a bare machine, able to 
> >      PXE boot (ideally otherwise booting from a CD or USB key) 
> >      64bits with hardware virtualization support
> >    - at least one network connecting the machines and DNS and DHCP
> >      for that network are under the user control (this may be relaxed
> >      in the future)
> >    General feedback is that this is a very contraining set, which may put
> >    many 'would be' testers off, it's really better to put those upfront
> >    nothing is worse from their viewpoint than spending time for nothing,
> >    on the other hand being explicit may get some of them in an helping mood
> >    since we generally want to remove/ease a lot of those requirements.
> 
> I've expanded the detail in the FAQ to give much more info about the
> requirements for deployment - can you take a look at it on the website
> now. I think it covers the points you raise here.

  amount of disk on the root user, and memeory required by the appliance VM 
could be added. I'm not sure this really pertains only to the FAQ, but at the beginning of the installation informations.

> >   - Building the appliance from a kickstart is actually hard to set up,
> >     do not suggest it as a way to avoid the time of the download
> >       "Booting and provisioning a host or a VM with a kickstart is left
> >       as an exercise for the reader."
> >     is condescending, actually very hard, get rid of the section, assume
> >     user will follow the standard track (download + using KVM), but document
> >     separately the process for rebuilding the appliance, and changes needed
> >     to run it as a Xen fully-virt domain (I assume only the xml and way to
> >     launch the applicance need changes)
> 
> I'd like to get to a place where building an either the wui appliance,
> or the managed host appliance consists of nothing more than invoking the
> Fedora livecd-creator tool. There is some work going on to make the
> livecd-creator more general purpose, so I think this is doable in the
> the Fedora 9 timescale.

  when it will be easy with standard tools, sure, indicate so, but at the
moment this is rather misleading

> 
> Just a reminder to anyone with suggestions - the wiki is available for any
> adhoc content you think will be useful to others...

  Hum, but a Wiki does not replace a complete and clear documentation ;-)

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/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine  http://rpmfind.net/