Re: [Libvir] feature sujestions

Daniel Veillard wrote: >On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 12:41:22PM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote: > >>Richard W.M. Jones wrote: >>Some distributed stuff to complement the remote features above: >>Cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) integration with virt-manager for >>being able to graphically pick what profile the user wants to install >>from a list of remote boot servers. (There's an XMLRPC API for this), >>and also ways to configure the boot server from a simple GTK app (not >>part of virt-manager). This could be of use where people want to >>roll out configurations that someone else has set up for them, but they >>are not comfortable with the command line tools. Perhaps it would be >>possible to export a set of virt-manager settings to Cobbler for reuse >>by virt-manager users on other machines. >> > > I agree we need something along those lines, and IMHO if they are more >comfortable using point and click, I guess they would also prefer have >automatic discovery of where cobbler was installed. Do we have (or could >add) avahi support for discovery of the service. Added a few days ago upstream, yes (0.6.1 candidate). You have to install avahi-tools, it's not a hard RPM requires, but if it's there, cobbler will publish as "cobblerd".

> If most install options >could be centralized (think like an automatic setup template based for >example on the user LDAP info), provisioning for a new user could come >as simple an UI as: > "A centralized setting si available, pick one of the OSes" > "Fedora 7" > "Fedora 6" > "Centos 5" > ... > Right now Cobbler is all hierarchial (distros -> profiles -> systems) and there's a XMLRPC API. So you could have a drop down "pick your distro" and then be able to pick your profile under the distro. You could optionally be able to pick a system definition (which includes a MAC address) to deploy but it would fine to leave that out if it didn't make sense.

>maybe even the processor count and memory size could be defaulted >from the centalized profiles. >Yes you can do this already from the CLI, but being able to make it >trivial and integrated in the virtmanager GUI, would probably make a >big difference in usability. > Yep, I like this. A good way to fine defaults for each distro would be to see if there is a default profile named after the distro, which is what "cobbler import" creates today if you feed it a DVD or rsync mirror. Or they could optionally pick another profile, and have the option of refining choices either way.