[virt-tools-list] Re: [et-mgmt-tools] RFC: virt-manager: Manager UI rework

[Cole Robinson]

Dennis J. wrote:
> On 07/24/2009 12:22 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
>> out a screenshot here:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png
>>
>> The code can be cloned from here:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui
>>
>> I've changed the following pieces:
>>
>> - Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
>> this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
>> UI convention, and is more intuitive.
>>
>> - Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
>> was using this option, and it was only taking up space.
>>
>> - Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
>> and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
>> were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
>> list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
>> comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
>> could provide many more comparison metrics.
>>
>> - Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
>> or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
>> the metric of their choice. Screenshot:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png
> 
> I don't find it very useful that the VMs are divided according to the VM
> driver they use. From my perspective I have machines X, Y and Z and most
> of the time I don't really care if they are Xen, KVM, Qemu, etc. VMs.

Agreed, it's very likely that users will have a homogeneous setup anyways wrt
hypervisors.

> If I have 10 Webservers of which 5 run on Xen and 5 on KVM then I would
> still like to see them as a group of 10 Webservers rather than being
> split into two groups according to the driver.
> 

They will be listed as a group of 10 webservers. The manager view is organized
by libvirt connections, so in the above case you would have 10 connections to
10 host (which happen to be split KVM and Xen).

The case shown in the screenshot doesn't indicate this very well, but it isn't
new behavior: current virt-manager works the same way. The connection labels
should be tweaked though to place a higher emphasis on hostname as opposed to
hypervisor type (unless we are only working locally), so I'll play with that.

> In fact I think the grouping should be defined by the user e.g.
> "Webservers-extranet", "Webservers-intranet", "Databases", etc.
> 

That's an interesting idea. Not likely to happen in the short term though.

Thanks,
Cole