Re: KVM usability

From: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>
To: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
Cc: "Nikolai K. Bochev" <n.bochev@grandstarco.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
	Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>,
	Yanmin Zhang <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>,
	ming m lin <ming.m.lin@intel.com>,
	sheng yang <sheng.yang@intel.com>,
	Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@redhat.com>,
	KVM General <kvm@vger.kernel.org>,
	Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>,
	Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>,
	Fr??d??ric Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
	Cole Robinson <crobinso@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: KVM usability
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 14:56:42 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100302145642.GF7949@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4B8D2644.5020505@redhat.com>

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 03:52:52PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On 03/02/10 15:37, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 03:22:07PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> >>On 03/02/10 14:37, Nikolai K. Bochev wrote:
> >>>I don't see where this argument is leading to. So far there are
> >>>arguments that qemu/kvm sucks as a desktop virtualization, now
> >>>suddenly the gui tools are shitty and everything should be done cli ,
> >>>because there's no man pages for virt-manager. Explain.
> >>
> >>Lets face it:  virt-manager has a big bunch of problems.  For starters
> >>there is no (gui) way to create a virtual machine other than installing
> >>one from a iso image or via pxe.  So if you downloaded a disk image and
> >>want to boot it ->  no cookie for you.  Likewise if you have a bunch of
> >>already installed guests and want to migrate from $othertool to
> >>virt-manager you can't do that easily.
> >
> >The ability to import existing KVM disk images is available in the
> >latest release of virt-manager, targetted for Fedora 13.
> 
> Glad to hear that.  Are these bits in F12 virt-preview already?

I believe so.

> >Migrating
> >from another tool like VMWare  is a much harder than just importing
> >the disk image, since you have to update the drivers inside the guest,
> >likely reconfigure several config files, etc, etc. There is work on
> >a full v2v tool to automate this task, for both Linux&  Windows guests.
> 
> I meant migrating from another qemu management tool, be it some other 
> gui tool or self-baked shell scripts or something else.

That's pretty much what the 'disk import' could deal with, unless we wanted
to provide a way to read the config files from those other  qemu mgmt tools
directly on a case-by-case basis

Daniel
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