[Ovirt-devel] The oVirt networking UI

[David Lutterkort]

I am trying to understand what I can and can not do with the ovirt
networking UI ('Edit network' for an individual node). 

For starters, it's insanely confusing. On a machine where 'ifconfig -a |
grep HWaddr' gives the following list

        br0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:30:1B:43:95:30  
        eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:30:1B:43:95:30  
        ovirtbr0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 96:B5:EB:E8:CB:60  
        pan0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr AE:A7:D3:C1:EC:A4  
        virbr0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 6A:4C:CD:A6:1D:D3  
        vnet0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 96:B5:EB:E8:CB:60  
        vnet1     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 3A:3D:CF:1D:54:83
        
I get a dropdown for NIC's that has the following entries:

        00:00:00:00
        00:00:00:00:00:00
        6A:4C:CD:A6:1D:D3
        D6:95:2F:16:C1:E9
        DA:E7:3D:C3:54:A8
        96:B5:EB:E8:CB:60
        6A:4C:CD:A6:1D:D3
        DA:E7:3D:C3:54:A8
        3A:3D:CF:1D:54:83
        96:B5:EB:E8:CB:60
        D6:95:2F:16:C1:E9
        6A:4C:CD:A6:1D:D3
        AE:A7:D3:C1:EC:A4
        DA:E7:3D:C3:54:A8
        00:30:1B:43:95:30
        
and no - the duplication in there is not a typo, neither are spurious
entries like 'DA:E7:3D:C3:54:A8' - there is no such NIC on that machine.

Since I have eth0 enslaved to br0, there is absolutely no way for me to
distinguish them in the UI.

When I select one of the NIC's, the 'Network' dropdown is populated with
a bunch of UUID's, many of them repeated and all with the label
'Physical Network - DHCP' Surprisingly, the UUID's for the
libvirt-defined networks is not amongst them. They seem to be the UUID's
of my ovirt nodes.

This UI is completely unusable as it stands. At a minimum, we need to
fix this UI by

      * filter the list of NIC's to remove nonsensical entries (like lo
        or interfaces enslaved to a bridge)
      * show some human-readable name for each NIC (like 'br0', 'eth0'
        etc.)
      * give the user a way to attach meaningful labels to the networks
        instead of having them stare at UUID's
      * when editing a VM, present the user with a _dropdown list_ of
        known network _names_ (not UUID's) so that they can select a
        network, which will then make sure that the vnic has the
        interface on that network as its source

So, the flow would be something like the following:

      * There is nothing to autodiscover about networks (as seems to be
        the case right now, since the networks table gets populated with
        something)
      * When a node is first added to oVirt, mark all its interfaces to
        be on the 'unkown' or 'surprise' or "router's choice" network
      * For each node, the user can assign symbolic names to each of the
        NIC's (bonus points for suppressing spurious NIC's, but as long
        as the user can distinguish what NIC they are dealing with,
        that's at least usable)
      * When creating a VM, user indicates which network the VNIC should
        be on

David