Just a few days ago I wrote a blog mentioning the announcement of redhat’s virtual machine manager version 0.8.0. It’s still freshly baked and it’s currently not in any of the repositories other than devel repository. I decided to go ahead and build an rpm based on the spec file in redhat’s devel repository and take it for a test run to see how it compares to previous versions. Below is a list the new functionality, some of which still needs some more exploration. I tried to keep the review as concise as possible.

Main Manager Viewer

The first change you’ll notice will be the main viewer. The main viewer looked a whole lot different to what was shown in the mailing list for version 0.8.0. I suspect (and hope) that redhat will tweak this before releasing to the stable repositories. If you were to download the release as it from the official virtual machine manager website, your main viewer will look like the following.

This is a far cry from the previous versions which looked much nicer but again, I’m betting that redhat will clean up this interface before releasing to the repositories.

New video support

Previous versions of virtual machine manager did not allow you to specify vga drivers and I found this a welcomed addition in this release. When you connect to your hypervisor with the new virtual machine manager, the new version seems to automatically add a default vga driver to your guest config if none was previously configured. The only beef I have with the new vga support is that you can’t specify it during virtual machine creation. Once your virtual machine is created though you can change it.

Changing your vga driver, however, is very awkward. The only way I could change it was to add another one so there were now two drivers and only then remove the one I didn’t want. I would be interested in hearing if anybody else experienced this. Overall, the added vga driver support is a good addition as it allows you to get high resolution graphics with your guest virtual machine. Note though that I found the vga driver “vga” to be unstable with my windows xp guest so I ended up having to use a cirrus vga driver with xp which doesn’t give as high a resolution.

New Clone Wizard

The clone wizard is a simple and straightforward interface. You can begin a clone session either from the main viewer or from the console window. Below shows the menu from the main viewer where you right click on your guest virtual machine to begin a clone session.

Readonly disks such as cdroms can be shared with your newly cloned machine. This clone does a full copy or your virtual machine and adds the following unique identifiers: mac-address and uuid. It also automatically appends a “-clone” to the name of your virtual machine.

System Tray

You can opt to enable a system tray utility for your virtual machine manager by enabling it in the menu Edit ->Preferences -> General Tab from the main viewer.

You can then easily access your virtual machines from the system tray. I thought this was a nice feature as it makes it really easy to find your virtual machine especially if you’ve got a lot going on on your desktop.

CPU pinning support

You can now pin your virtual machine to a cpu if you’ve a multiple core/cpu machine (which most of us have today). This interface is found in the details tab of your console window.

Issues

The only real issue I had was when creating a new guest virtual machine and opting to use existing storage. In this case the text box for specifying the exisiting storage remains empty. This shouldn’t really be too big a problem as most people will want to create new storage during virtual machine creation.

Conclusion

Redhat’s virtual machine manager has come a long way and is starting to show some real usability. I’ve gone from using command line exclusively to now only using command line for testing purposes. There’s still a lot to do but it’s still only version 0.8 and it’s developing at a nice pace. Apart from the bug with creating vms using existing storage, I’ve had no real usability problems with it. I am, however, looking forward to a nicer main viewer. If anybody else has tested this version, we welcome your comments.