Howdy, I've been thinking a bit further on the whole issue around libvirt and why the situation as is isn't satisfying. I came to the following points that currently hurt building ease of use for KVM:
1) Brand This is one of the major issues we have ourselves when it comes to appliances. We can ship appliances built for VMware. We can ship appliances built for Xen. But we can't ship appliances built for KVM, because there is no single management app we could target. That destroys the KVM brand IMHO. 2) Machine description If we build an appliance, we also create a configuration file that describes the VM. We can create .vmx files, we can create xen config files. We can not create KVM config files. There are none. We could create shell scripts, but would that help? 3) Configuration conversion Party due to qemu not having a configuration format, partly due to libvirt's ambivalent approach, there is always conversion in configuration formats involved. I think this is the main reason for the feature lag. If there wasn't a conversion step, there wouldn't be lag. You could just hand edit the config file and be good. Point 2 needs to be solved anyways. We need a machine config format for qemu. For general -M description as well as for specific VM description. The command line options just become too complicated and too hard to reproduce and save. Just think of live migration with hot-plugged devices. Or safe savevm + loadvm. The current logic ends there. I can imagine 1) going away if we would set libvirt + virt-manager as _the_ front-end and have everyone focus on it. I suppose it would also help to rebrand it by then, but I'm not 100% sure about that. Either way, there would have to be a definite statement that libvirt is the solution to use. And _everyone_ would have to agree on that. Sounds like a hard task. And by then we still don't really have a branded product stack. Point 3 is the really tough one. It's the very basis of libvirt. And it's plain wrong IMHO. I hate XML. I hate duplicated efforts. The current conversion involves both. Every option added to qemu needs to be added to libvirt. In XML. Bleks. Reading on IRC I seem to not be the only person thinking that, just the first one mentioning this aloud I suppose. But that whole XML mess really hurts us too. Nobody wants to edit XML files. Nobody wants to have two separate syntaxes to describe the same thing. It complicates everything without a clear benefit. And it puts me in a position where I can't help people because I don't know the XML format. That should never happen. Sure, for libvirt it makes sense to be hypervisor-agnostic. For qemu it doesn't. We want to be _the_ hypervisor. Setting our default front-end to something that is agnostic weakens our point. And it slows down development. And it hurts integration. And thus usability, thus adoption. It hurts us. That's what I've concluded so far on the whole situation as is. I find it sad to be the one speaking it out, but IMHO going with libvirt as default management front-end is a dead end. It will hurt us more than it will help us. That said I don't think it'd be bad to cooperate or encourage people to use libvirt. In fact I believe the opposite - it's great if you want to be agnostic. It just isn't when you're not. And we should differentiate there. Alex
