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

[NotMine999]

I feel like a lot of people missed this part:

[QUOTE]
Outside of RHEL, virt-manager is still being maintained.

This deprecation only applies to RHEL, and in particular, it doesn't apply to Fedora, which actively supports several technologies that RHEL does not (e.g. btrfs, KDE).[/QUOTE]

Will this deprecation apply to any distributions that base themselves on RHEL code and repositories? I can think of CentOS being in that category, but are there others?

I'm asking the question because I haven't used RHEL or any of it's derivatives in a decade...and others might be wondering.

As for myself, I haven't used RHEL or any of it's derivatives in 10 years or more, and I have no plans to ever touch them again.

[Michael_S]

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.

I didn't know, thanks. I've only been using virt-manager at home, at work it's all Amazon EC2 orchestrated through Terraform.

[darkbasic]

I didn't know, thanks. I've only been using virt-manager at home, at work it's all Amazon EC2 orchestrated through Terraform.

I personally think virt-manager is awesome and I don't really understand why they are phasing it out for a web based interface (NOTE: I'm a full stack web developer so I don't hate web applications at all)

[mos87]

typical

[itoffshore]

Oh man this is sucky news! Can one of the other distros pick it up? I love LibVirt and I used it almost daily to manage all the machines on both my home and business network. Its a really well done tool.

as root enter the virsh console with "virsh" & then "help"

I only ever use virt-manager for the initial vm configuration - stopping & starting machines / networks or editng the vm xml config can be done with the virsh console.

[sc3252]

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.

[cjcox]

Last time I tried cockpit it could do about 50% of what virt-manager could do. So, who knows, maybe it does 80% now. What is needed (hint), 125%, that is, it needs to be able to do everything that virt-manager can do today, plus add things that virt-manager couldn't do. Just my own opinion.

Here's the mistake. Right now, they know it can't do everything that virt-manager does. So... at least fix that.

[GraysonPeddie]

To see what all the fuss is about, I installed cockpit and cockpit-machines. After I start cockpit using SystemD, I then went into https:\/\/vmserver:9090 ("/" is escaped with "" to prevent browsers from turning into hyperlink), I logged in as a "kvmguests" and clicked in "Virtual Machines." For testing, I start up archlinux_desktop and clicked in "Consoles."

I then click in "Launch Remote Viewer" and found out that virt-manager needs to be installed. I installed virt-viewer and relaunched it again from the Cockpit. This time, Virt-Viewer opened up and I saw "Connecting to graphic server." I can't go anywhere from there.

Why can't my browser just open the console instead of installing a virt-viewer client? In fact, why use Cockpit while I can simply use Virt-Manager that I've been using for years?

Cockpit Virtual Machine package is half-baked. I'm going back to using virt-manager in Linux. And yes, I am using Virt-Manager in my Arch Linux desktop (BTW, as Derek Taylor from DistroTube would have me mention the three letters/words "by the way").

[Delgarde]

I personally think virt-manager is awesome and I don't really understand why they are phasing it out for a web based interface

Because, broadly-speaking, virt-manager is a GUI tool for managing VMs running on the local machine... great if you're a desktop user who wants to use VMs, not so great if you're a sysadmin responsible for managing large numbers of VMs on large numbers of hosts. Whereas a web interface like Cockpit is great for remote-managing large numbers of machines... especially when "remote" may mean "from your phone in bed because someone needs a server rebooted at 3am".

[darkbasic]

Because, broadly-speaking, virt-manager is a GUI tool for managing VMs running on the local machine... great if you're a desktop user who wants to use VMs, not so great if you're a sysadmin responsible for managing large numbers of VMs on large numbers of hosts. Whereas a web interface like Cockpit is great for remote-managing large numbers of machines... especially when "remote" may mean "from your phone in bed because someone needs a server rebooted at 3am".

I use it to manage VMs on multiple different servers with no problem at all: you can connect to multiple servers simultaneously. Also I'm not saying that something like Cockpit shouldn't exist: it shouldn't just be forced down everyone's throat by deprecating virt-manager.