KVM, virt-manager, etc.

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 10:34:56AM +0100, Soren Hansen wrote:
> In case anyone missed my blog post about it last week, the (admittedly
> quick and dirty) wiki page is at:
> 
>    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KvmVirtManagerEtc

I made a few trivial changes to the page along the way as I tried this out.
Some questions and comments:

 * Is there a plan to wrap the tools or otherwise eliminate the need for
   non-obvious command line arguments (e.g. qemu:///system)?

 * I assume it's possible to create the VM using the command-line tools as
   well as the GUI.  Can this be added to the documentation?  Since our use
   cases are server-oriented, I think this is important.

 * The only option available on "Choose a virtualization method" was "fully
   virtualized" (presumably that is expected) and "Enable kernel / hardware
   acceleration" was disabled.  The processor in my test system (AMD
   Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+) seems to be listed on
   http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors though
   perhaps it is the wrong stepping.  Is there a canonical way to determine
   whether it supports the extensions?  Linux says "stepping: 2" though AMD
   says the two available steppings are "F2" and "E6".

 * Due to the above, I wasn't actually able to test creating a guest.  It
   tried to invoke qemu and failed (because it wasn't installed).

 * We should provide reasonable defaults for every aspect of creating a new
   VM.  The experience we are aiming for is to enable a new Ubuntu
   installation to have a virtual guest created immediately, with no
   decisions necessary: this should be a single command, or
   "next->next->next->finish" operation.
   
   - System Name can be autogenerated as a default

   - Should point to an installable Ubuntu image of some sort by default.  I
     have ISOs lying around, but most servers won't.  What can we do here?

   - Storage should default to a simple file of an appropriate size, stored
     in a standard location (perhaps not the user's home directory)

 * libvirtd failed to come up after a reboot, due to /var/run/libvirt not
   being created.  Is this a known bug?

-- 
 - mdz