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

[starshipeleven]

Virt-manager has it's share of idiocy. For example select a piece of hardware and want to modify it... need I say more?

The single most important thing they did about that issue was providing the "edit XML" in the preferences so I can enable the XML tab and edit the fucking XML manually in the fields I want. It's kind of unprofessional but it's good enough for me.

Works for everything, renaming or changing path of pools, and for hardware.

[starshipeleven]

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.

virt-manager is a remote administration tool that ALSO works locally, I can connect to any number of remote servers and do stuff from a single interface.

I quite frankly don't buy the "doing sysadmin over a smartphone" thing, if you are down to that you have at least 3-4 other failures in your equipment (how is a sysadmin not having a work laptop with him and no fallback PC ready? Does he like risking his job like that?) or you are a moron.

[starshipeleven]

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

You misspelled VMWare

[starshipeleven]

This is terrible. I just installed cockpit to try it out. It cant do anything pretty much other than to start and stop a VM. You can't even specify if it starts at boot, or where to install the VM at. This is not a replacement for anything.

Afaik the only "good" web gui for KVM I've seen is in Unraid

[microcode]

I agree with you about the web. It's the direction that the world is moving at the moment, if you're not on web you're not "hip". Many projects moving from native to web-base has been a good thing in terms of portability and saving development costs, but...

Native GUI spice client does a lot that CLI/WebBrowser typically doesn't support. For example passing keyboard/mouse to VM with custom keyboard bindings for release. I can press keys like ctrl+alt+del and nothing is passed to my host. It simply isn't practical to implement that functionality in CLI/WebBrowser. Device passthrough and quick USB redirects are also more convenient via native GUI in my opinion. Starting VMs or live backups is what id typically use CLI for, but the tools complement each other. That said I like to automate start/backups/cryptsetup functions and mostly rely on CLI for debugging.

I shared my concerns on Reddit when they made the announcement a few months ago, but the community seems to enjoy silently down-voting my view points. https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/commen...d_in_favor_of/

I don't have time at the moment to maintain virt-manager, perhaps I would pay someone to do that if I feel I can't go without it.

Edit: Ignore my previous sentence, as per the first sentence in the post and re:fi.64. It's still being maintained ouside of RHEL.

I will say, the ASRock Rack web KVM is pretty slick. It streams ISOs to the virtual optical drive over a WebSocket, piecemeal, rather than uploading the whole thing.

There is genuine value in it, but it is in most ways a worse experience than a native interface, even a more basic one.