Last week saw the latest release of virt-manager , 0.8.4, featuring new user interface additions and functionality. Some of these changes address pain points of previous releases that is obvious to anyone familiar with virt-manager. In this post, I’ll walk through these changes so you know what to expect when you eventually upgrade.

Changing Network Device Models

If you’re familiar with virt-manager, then you’ll know that within the VM details window, there are lots of virtual machine settings that require you to delete and re-create them in order to make any changes. The virt-manager developers recognized this and even listed it on the official development roadmap. One of these settings which required this ‘delete and re-create’ procedure in order to configure is the network device. This is a configuration users probably change on a regular basis, if only to experiment. This release allows you to select from a drop down list of device models, a much improved interface from previous releases. Below shows a snapshot of this new interface.

Import existing Disk

There is now an option when creating a virtual machine which allows you to import an existing disk. This addition essentially sets your new virtual machine to boot from disk first. Personally I find this option redundant as you can also select an existing disk if booting from cdrom when creating a new virtual machine. In fairness to the developers, the option to specify boot order was a recent addition to qemu-kvm so I think this initial interface will change in future. In my opinion, a new virtual machine doesn’t need to boot on configuration. I think there should be an option to not allow the virtual machine to boot on initial creation. Then you would have the option to change boot order and any other tweaks before first boot. Below shows this new option.

Boot Device Order

As mentioned in the previous section, qemu-kvm recently added an option which allows you to specify boot device order. I mentioned this new option in a previous post here. This interface is now exposed to virt-manager and is shown in the snapshot below. I’m confident that the initial virtual machine creation dialog will be updated in future releases of virt-manager to make good use of this option.

Specify Shared Network Device such as Bridges

Virt-manager recently added the ability to configure bridges as described in this recent post. This release now allows you to specify bridges as your network device. You will see this option in two places; one during virtual machine creation and when adding a network device. Below shows the option when adding a network device.

Below shows the option when creating a new virtual machine.

Watchdog Device Support

Qemu allows you to specify a virtual hardware watchdog device. This virtual device is enabled by the guest and must be periodically polled by an agent inside the guest or the guest will be restarted by default. You can specify different actions other than resetting your guest. Options include shutdown, poweroff, pause, debug and none. The shutdown action is not recommended as it requires that your guest respond to ACPI signals which may be unreliable if the guest’s watchdog timer has expired. The two models available are ib700 and i6300esb based on intel’s 6300esb i/o controller hub. The ib700 is the simpler model with a single timer. The i6300esb features a pci-based dual timer watchdog. This configuration is now available in virt-manager and shown in the snapshot below from the “add hardware” dialog.

Virtual Machine Description

One other minor feature is the ability to add a text description of your guest in the details tab under the overview section shown below. I haven’t seen yet where else this information is displayed but it’s good to have this kind of information tied to each guest.

Conclusion

Release 0.8.4 adds more ease of use and functionality to virt-manager making it friendlier for typical use cases at home and small business data centers. It still has a ways to go but it is moving along at a steady pace. Virt-manager is also heavily dependent on projects such as libvirt and ultimately what qemu exposes via command line so it can only do what these projects allow it to. I think virt-manager has a lot of potential as an out of the box gui management tool given it’s underlying technology of python and glade which allows for rapid prototyping and development. Feel free to ask questions and comment on your experience with this release.