[Ovirt-devel] Questions on the Server Suite UI

[Hugh O. Brock]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 09:38:45AM -0500, Bryan Kearney wrote:
> Below are a couple of functional question on the UI having installed it,  
> and reviewed version .6 of the docs. I realize the answer may be "in an  
> upcoming release", but I wanted to at least throw it out:

Hi Bryan, thanks for checking out oVirt!

> 1) Can I set quotas at the VM pool level, or are they only inherited  
> from the hardware pool?

Yes -- in fact the VM pool is the main carrier for quotas. The
hardware pool quota settings merely define a default for VM pools
created within a hardware pool. I recall a bug one or two releases ago
however where the "edit quota" link in the details pane for a VM pool
was either obscured or missing -- I think I even filed the BZ for
it. I thought it was fixed in the current release but maybe not. I'll
check on it.

> 2) Are there plans to support moving vm pools between hardware pools?

I believe we had decided we didn't want to do this, simply because the
act of moving a VM pool to another hardware pool would imply
mass-migrating all the VMs there to a hardware pool where they would
not necessarily be able to run (the hardware pool defines hardware
compatibility -- e.g. Intel vs. AMD -- and migration boundaries). Can
you think of a use case we should to support here?

> 3) Can I move a storage server from one pool to another if it is being  
> used? If not, where do I see the information about where it is being 
> used?

You can definitely move a storage server from one pool to another;
however, we need to add validation to make sure you can't do that
while the server is in use. There is a lot more UI around the whole
storage server/storage volume area coming in the next release.

> 4) In the appliance setup, is there a ui path to add users to LDAP?

The path for the moment is to browse to
http://management.priv.ovirt.org/ipa. However IPA's web UI requires
that you have a kerberos principal, which you may not if you are
browsing to the appliance from outside its management network. We have
been leaning on the IPA guys to add fallback http authentication for
this case, but they haven't done it yet. In a future release I would
like to have a simple "add user" dialog within oVirt itself.

> 5) In the docs it says that a user is defined at the Hardware / VM pool  
> level and can not be moved. But, I assume that a person can have access  
> to many hardware or VM pools. Is that accurate?

Yes, I'm not sure what the docs are implying there. I assume they mean
that user privileges are set for hardware pools or VM pools
(correct). They inherit down the tree from there.

> 6) What is a SmartPool?

A SmartPool is a way to group arbitrary objects you might be
interested in without navigating down the hierarchy to each one. So if
I have servers in three different VM pools, for example, I might pull
them all into a single smart pool to work on them or view their stats.

>
> Couple of UI RFEs:
> - Given the richness of the UI, I keep expecting a right click context  
> menu. Especially in the tree nav.

That would be a good idea, yes... paging Mr. Guiditta...

> - When creating a VM, a refresh button would be nice. Unless you have  
> push to the client.

Also true. push-to-the-client will be coming but not right away, and
I'm not quire sure what form it will take yet.

Thanks for this, let me know if you have any other questions!

Take care,
--Hugh