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

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 26 June 2020 at 04:19 PM EDT. 44 Comments
RED HAT
The upstream virt-manager project including the virt-manager user-interface is still being maintained, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has decided to deprecate the virt-manager UI moving forward.

With the recent RHEL 8.2 release it turns out the virt-manager UI is deprecated. This is the common graphical user interface for managing VMs on the likes of KVM and Xen with libvirt and has been quite common for a decade. Virt-manager has been around for a while for those wanting a means of easily creating, managing, and viewing virtual machines running on Linux.

Red Hat is deprecating the Virt-Manager interface in RHEL in order to push along Cockpit. Cockpit is the web-based server management interface that offers a lot of functionality from physical server management to network management, application management, SELinux handling, and also functionality around containers and virtual machines.

From Cockpit you can view VMs and have similar functionality to virt-manager. It appears that Red Hat is wanting to present Cockpit as the unified user-interface for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as opposed to the host of different utilities that may or may not be known to users/administrators.

The virt-manager interface is likely to remain available for the remainder of RHEL 8.x releases while likely will be removed in RHEL9. But at least if it's dropped from RHEL9, given the popularity of virt-manager it's quite likely to appear in the EPEL repository of extra packages. Outside of RHEL, virt-manager is still being maintained.

More details on the virt-manager UI deprecation in RHEL via this personal blog post by virt-manager lead developer Cole Robinson of Red Hat.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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