RHEL Deprecating The Virt-Manager UI In Favor Of The Cockpit Web Console

[F.Ultra]

Seriously? That's very annoying. I'd need to run a web server to manage VMs now instead of a normal UI??? I hope someone will still develop it. Very not smart move.

Cockpit is self-contained and if you run it on systemd it's also socket actived.

[vain]

Well I'm checking it right now in my Fedora and actually looks good. I'm using virsh instead of virt-manager, but still nice alternative. I just removed cockpit-packagekit and PackageKit itself (luckily it's weak dependency), because I really don't like PackageKit. But I must say, cockpit now is something completely different than I remember few years ago. Also is sweet that u can connect via serial console to the guest machine from cockpit. Cute.

[R41N3R]

I like cockpit a lot, but for several cases I always had to fallback to Virt-Manager. Some configurations like disk management, hardware management, glusterfs or just to view the VM output on screen without a tty are not well supported by cockpit. And the translation in cockpit got worse and worse in every release too ;-)

[Delgarde]

I can understand why they want to move to WEB. Todays GUI toolkits (GTK, QT and WxWidgets) are overly complex and does not provide a simple and efficient way to create a simple standarized GUI.

Actually it has nothing to do with GUI toolkits... it's purely that webapps are much more convenient to access remotely. This isn't a tool for someone sitting on a desktop machine who wants to run a VM — this is a tool for someone who's administering hundreds of physical and virtual machines across a network. Possibly from his phone, because someone called him up at 3am to fix something.

[vain]

I like cockpit a lot, but for several cases I always had to fallback to Virt-Manager.

True, also I just noticed that I can't see snapshots option for machine in Cockpit (maybe just not available yet in my version). However since there is a terminal in cockpit, you can always use virsh directly :-)

[boxie]

Well I downloaded it and tried it, so far it seems alright - FYI you use a native spice client to connect the to VMs

[waxhead]

Actually it has nothing to do with GUI toolkits... it's purely that webapps are much more convenient to access remotely. This isn't a tool for someone sitting on a desktop machine who wants to run a VM — this is a tool for someone who's administering hundreds of physical and virtual machines across a network. Possibly from his phone, because someone called him up at 3am to fix something.

Which virt-manager already does an excellent job at. I do not agree that a webapp always is more convenient to access remotely.

[DanL]

This isn't a tool for someone sitting on a desktop machine who wants to run a VM

Unfortunately, the best GUI tool I've seen for that is Virtualbox. I wish qemu had a nice GUI equivalent to that.

[lumks]

Good move. Cockpit is by far better. No need to have a GUIserver of some sort on your VM management. With more pressure on it, it'll move on quickly. For local VM, there is gnome-boxes and if you need anything advanced, go for libvirtd directly.

[darkbasic]

I can understand putting emphasis on Cockpit, because - with proper authentication and authorization systems in place - it's probably easier to manage remotely than using VNC or something for virt-manager.

But I don't understand deprecating virt-manager.

You don't need VNC to use virt-manager remotely: it has a client-server architecture so you can run your client on your laptop and connect directly to your server.