alt Hacker NewsThere used to be virt-manager
Wonder if it’s still around ? Hope it’s doing well !
Replies
I use it multiple times a day, and it's great! It doesn't try to hide details from you, but it does put a well-thought out GUI in front so you don't have to stumble around. It's not perfect, does take some getting used to, but it's stable and relatively comprehensive. I love it. Caveat: I'm mainly using it for home usage in my home lab.
I also love that I can drop to the CLI easily for scripts and it plays perfectly well with virt-manager, and it can be used easily over SSH to manage VMs on a remote host (which is key to my use case).
It's usable (?) as a toy: numerous gui inconsistencies and lack of security isolation [0].
Can't say whether the of lack funding (move to Cockpit from Red Hat) is the reason, or maintainer is just an obstructionist (strictest feature policy).
I still use it for home projects and it's great!
Little wonky to get the config files all setup for a VM but LLMs make that a breeze these days.
Until recently, I used it routinely for VMs, and it worked solidly and reliably. There is a ZFS storage backend as well, always nice to see since I've loved to use zvols for VMs, even when I did VirtualBox on OpenIndiana back before ZFS on Linux was viable.
But I found that Proxmox fit my needs much better than wrestling vanilla Ubuntu or Debian into a VM server, particularly for things like backup/restore and instrumentation, or setting up a bridge on a desktop-based installation. Since both are based on QEMU/KVM, it wasn't too hard to move my VMs (one thing you might need to look out for is changing network interface names).
Unfortunately it still exists. Virt manager drives me crazy because it hides the VM files in its own directory with permissions that aren't yours forcing you to use sudo to manually manage your own fucking vm files. Creating a new VM? You're forced to pick an OS by typing the name of your OS into a search box which is tedious and doesnt give you an option for generic x86 machine. I hate it with a burning passion and instead manually manage VMs by reading the qemu man page and writing a script to directly invoke qemu. I'd recommend VirtualBox over it any day.
"around" is the best way to describe it; the libvirt/virt-manager ecosystem isn't dead, but redhat killing off ovirt/rhev support drained a lot of resources out of it.
And for some bizarre reason people decided that the much less mature (both organizationally and technologically) proxmox VE is the best thing since sliced bread, so everyone who does care about linux virtualization is now trying to hammer some homelabbers' collection of perl scripts into a replacement.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.