RFC: virt-manager: Manager UI rework

[Cole Robinson]

Hi all,

I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
out a screenshot here:

http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png

The code can be cloned from here:

http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui

I've changed the following pieces:

- Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
UI convention, and is more intuitive.

- Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
was using this option, and it was only taking up space.

- Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
could provide many more comparison metrics.

- Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
the metric of their choice. Screenshot:

http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png

- Removed options to hide/view columns. Since we only have 3 columns now
and have trimmed all the fat, leave them on all the time.

These are basically the functional changes: I should be posting some
more changes soon to glitz this up (hopefully including prettier graph
renderers).

Questions or comments appreciated.

Thanks,
Cole

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[Dennis J.]

On 07/24/2009 12:22 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
> out a screenshot here:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png
>
> The code can be cloned from here:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui
>
> I've changed the following pieces:
>
> - Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
> this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
> UI convention, and is more intuitive.
>
> - Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
> was using this option, and it was only taking up space.
>
> - Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
> and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
> were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
> list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
> comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
> could provide many more comparison metrics.
>
> - Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
> or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
> the metric of their choice. Screenshot:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png

I don't find it very useful that the VMs are divided according to the VM
driver they use. From my perspective I have machines X, Y and Z and most of
the time I don't really care if they are Xen, KVM, Qemu, etc. VMs.
If I have 10 Webservers of which 5 run on Xen and 5 on KVM then I would
still like to see them as a group of 10 Webservers rather than being split
into two groups according to the driver.

In fact I think the grouping should be defined by the user e.g.
"Webservers-extranet", "Webservers-intranet", "Databases", etc.

regards,
   Dennis

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[Cole Robinson]

Dennis J. wrote:

> On 07/24/2009 12:22 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
>> out a screenshot here:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png
>>
>> The code can be cloned from here:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui
>>
>> I've changed the following pieces:
>>
>> - Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
>> this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
>> UI convention, and is more intuitive.
>>
>> - Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
>> was using this option, and it was only taking up space.
>>
>> - Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
>> and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
>> were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
>> list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
>> comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
>> could provide many more comparison metrics.
>>
>> - Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
>> or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
>> the metric of their choice. Screenshot:
>>
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png
>
> I don't find it very useful that the VMs are divided according to the VM
> driver they use. From my perspective I have machines X, Y and Z and most
> of the time I don't really care if they are Xen, KVM, Qemu, etc. VMs.

Agreed, it's very likely that users will have a homogeneous setup anyways wrt
hypervisors.

> If I have 10 Webservers of which 5 run on Xen and 5 on KVM then I would
> still like to see them as a group of 10 Webservers rather than being
> split into two groups according to the driver.
>

They will be listed as a group of 10 webservers. The manager view is organized
by libvirt connections, so in the above case you would have 10 connections to
10 host (which happen to be split KVM and Xen).

The case shown in the screenshot doesn't indicate this very well, but it isn't
new behavior: current virt-manager works the same way. The connection labels
should be tweaked though to place a higher emphasis on hostname as opposed to
hypervisor type (unless we are only working locally), so I'll play with that.

> In fact I think the grouping should be defined by the user e.g.
> "Webservers-extranet", "Webservers-intranet", "Databases", etc.
>

That's an interesting idea. Not likely to happen in the short term though.

Thanks,
Cole

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[Daniel P. Berrange-2]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 05:52:42PM +0200, Dennis J. wrote:

> On 07/24/2009 12:22 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
> >out a screenshot here:
> >
> >http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png
> >
> >The code can be cloned from here:
> >
> >http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui
> >
> >I've changed the following pieces:
> >
> >- Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
> >this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
> >UI convention, and is more intuitive.
> >
> >- Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
> >was using this option, and it was only taking up space.
> >
> >- Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
> >and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
> >were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
> >list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
> >comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
> >could provide many more comparison metrics.
> >
> >- Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
> >or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
> >the metric of their choice. Screenshot:
> >
> >http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png
>
> I don't find it very useful that the VMs are divided according to the VM
> driver they use. From my perspective I have machines X, Y and Z and most of
> the time I don't really care if they are Xen, KVM, Qemu, etc. VMs.
> If I have 10 Webservers of which 5 run on Xen and 5 on KVM then I would
> still like to see them as a group of 10 Webservers rather than being split
> into two groups according to the driver.

This isn't really dividing up VMs based on driver type. Each grouping
their represents a seperate libvirt connection, which under normal
usage would represent separate host. So the grouping is really just
hosts, and vms on the host.  The mockup here is a little misleading
in that it shows a bunch of libvirt connections on the same host but
with different hypervisors, which is not something you'd ever really
have.

Daniel
--
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[Cole Robinson]

Cole Robinson wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been reworking the main manager view in virt-manager. You can check
> out a screenshot here:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-overview.png
>
> The code can be cloned from here:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/virt-manager.manager_ui
>
> I've changed the following pieces:
>
> - Lower button bar is now a toolbar at the top of the window. I think
> this is obvious: a toolbar at the top is much more in line with existing
> UI convention, and is more intuitive.
>
> - Dropped the 'View: Active/Inactive' combo box. I don't think anybody
> was using this option, and it was only taking up space.
>
> - Dropped all columns except Name, Status, and Stats. Columns like vcpus
> and memory progress bar really added no value. Most of these columns
> were for stats reporting which, while useful, would largely balloon the
> list (if enabled) to the point of uselessness. If we want good stats
> comparison, we should have an entire separate screen for this, which
> could provide many more comparison metrics.
>
> - Allow changing what the single graph column is measuring: cpu, disk,
> or network. This way users can still have an at a glance comparison of
> the metric of their choice. Screenshot:
>
> http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/virt-manager/vmm-manager-1-graphs.png
>
> - Removed options to hide/view columns. Since we only have 3 columns now
> and have trimmed all the fat, leave them on all the time.
>
> These are basically the functional changes: I should be posting some
> more changes soon to glitz this up (hopefully including prettier graph
> renderers).
>

This has been pushed now.

Thanks,
Cole

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