Gauging Interest: RHEV Domain ISO manager
I am wondering if other people are interested in having a more robust and feature-rich interface for managing ISOs in RHEV.
I hate to sound critical but the dependency on the ISO domain makes me uncomfortable, as issues with ISO domain can cause much larger issues in the environment.
My current "issue" is that I would like to remove an existing ISO image. It's not really an issue, I suppose. Regardless, the procedure I have discovered is to simply go to the ISO directory and delete the image. And I have to admit, I am very afraid of doing this. So, afraid that I have looked for numerous references to the same process to confirm it actually works and won't corrupt some sort of RHEV table, etc...
It also makes me curious that if you can simply remove an ISO and RHEV dynamically recognizes the absence, why can't we simply copy the ISO into the directory and expect the same (but opposite) behavior?
So - I am wondering if others share my interest in an enhancement. And if so, I will submit and RFE.
Also - I have not used oVirt - but I am wondering if ISO management is the same with oVirt - or if this is a RHEV thing.
Thanks!
Responses
The current solution is indeed to just remove the file. And of course you can also add any ISO file in there, as long as it's permissions are set to 36:36 RHEV will detect it.
We have had file management for the ISO domains on our radar for a while now, but since there's a simple way of working around the current limitations, resources went to the more critical features (like storage live migration for example)
Guru
6863 points
Thanks Dan.
I did not realize you could just copy the file into the share. I will continue using the iso-uploader tool just to be safe ;-)
There is really no magic at work here, all rhevm-iso-uploader does is mount the ISO domain and copy the ISO over, then chown 36:36 and unmount. When an ISO listing is called, the relevant host will rescan the ISO mount and present the list of files it can use.
Personally, I almost always just scp my ISOs into the NFS server directly.
The whole ISO domain implementation has been bugging me for a long time. Copying and deleting the files directly is OK, except for people new to RHEV who are afraid of it. I can see the FUD questions: What else is missing when I copy/delete ISO domain images by hand? And even if it works fine with this version, what will break in the next version after I get used to doing it this way?
Another huuuge issue is, everything around the ISO domain should be integrated into RHEV-M, not tucked away into a Linux command line interface. Face it - most system admins, which are most of the RHEV target audience - are afraid of Linux. The whole way the ISO domain works just reminds them they have this ugly, unkown entity named Linux they don't have time or desire to learn. You can just see the FUD take over - better to spend the money to buy a "safe" competitor, and not learn more new stuff.
There's nothing wrong with the way the ISO domain works. I can even deal with its ugly, GUID naming scheme. But its user interface screams, "Afterthought". And sharing an ISO domain across many logical data centers is a **great** idea.
My 2 cents FWIW.
(Edits a couple days later)
Thinking about this some more - what purpose does iso-uploader really serve? To use iso-uploader, I probably browse to a website from my Windows IE, download the ISO I want, and store it locally someplace. Then I winscp or ftp it to a temp directory on my RHEV-M system, then ssh into RHEV-M and use iso-uploader to copy it into the ISO domain. How ugly is that?
Instead of that hassle, why not just make winscp the official, supported way to put ISO files in the ISO domain and get rid of iso-uploader? Document how to do it, including changing the ownership to 36.36. Later on, put something in the RHEV-M GUI, where a user can browse for an ISO file and click some buttons to upload it into the ISO domain with the correct ownership - and also give the user the ability to delete files from the ISO domain.
- Greg
Thanks for the detailed input Greg, to be frank, having used SolidICE and the RHEV for years now, I would agree with almost everything you say. But, instead of making excuses, let me just provide a bit of background...
In RHEV 2.x, RHEV-M was on a Windows machine, and the ISO uploader utility was graphical. When we moved to Linux, so did the utilities that were separated from RHEV-M itself (ISO uploader, log collector, rhevm-config), and their initial implementation couldn't help being made the "Linux way" sorta speak - because the RHEV-M server interface itself is not graphical any longer.
We have UI plugins coming into the next version, and once we have those, writing a web frontend for other utilities shouldn't be a hard task, though, unless someone else does it upstream, I can't commit to an exact RHEV version such a plugin will happen in. It's, as always, a matter of priorities and resources, and ISO domains are usable, and thus less important than some of the more enterprise-level features we are working very hard to implement.
Your history explanations and hints about upcoming features are much appreciated. Keep 'em coming :-)
It is 2016 - Why do we need an ISO domain at all? Why not fix the console tools so they support virtual media like all of the other virtualization tools out there. I should be able to map an ISO to a virtual DVD in the console from whatever workstation I am opening the console on. The whole ISO Domain concept is a kludge and a workaround for lack of support for vmedia in the console tools.
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