@fateknollogee Because nobody knows about XAPI. It's "just" a Citrix tool to make XS work with XenCenter. And that's the issue (as Scott said):

• it's Open Source but not community driven
• it's not enough modular
• it's in OCaml (not bad per se, but too confidential to build a community around it)

And the conclusion is a closely linked software to Citrix.

A "simple" solution would be a XAPI rewrite, while being community driven from the start. But Citrix doesn't care. Give me few millions, I can hire those guys myself and force Citrix to change its policy

edit: but believe me, I never spotted a stack like this anywhere else. It's a REAL complete stack.

Yes, and the conclusion is crystal clear: there's no "vCenter for KVM" because there is no community toolstack.

You can't "sell" a toolstack, it doesn't have any market/business sense. So you need to sell a turnkey hypervisor with your own toolstack. That's sad

@fateknollogee About what?

@fateknollogee said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@olivier are you listening ??

I'm reading, but yes. Why do you think that I'm not listening? The email from Anton could apply for Xen too. It's the exact same argument (it's related to Open Source hypervisor, he doesn't know Xen a lot probably). Sadly, XAPI is not enough community oriented.

@scottalanmiller That's fair to say that yes

2007 for Xen and Citrix (had the chance to meet the former Citrix CEO who did the operation)

So for KVM, it makes sense. I think we still feel that lack of fully opened/clear API on top of it, and that's almost the reason of why vendors are making money on that: providing a turnkey stuff on top of it.

When I start to read "java", I got a gag reflex

That's what I feared

edit: thanks for the links!

About LibVirt:

The libvirt project strongly recommends against talking to the RPC interface directly. They consider it to be a private implementation detail with the possibility of being entirely rearchitected in the future.

Great.

@romo said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

DigitalOcean's apparently using their own built go-qemu and go-libvirt which they opensourced

https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-go-qemu-and-go-libvirt/

Maybe that could help as well, they mention they are not fully stable but they are using them in production.

Thanks for the precious hint! I'll take a look (right now, if I had to build something on API level, I would do it in Rust, but that's just my 2 cents)

@romo I did a bit ago, but it was very incomplete: no network or storage management.

@scottalanmiller Exactly. That's very strange that a new fresh project like Kimchi is made on 1:1 basis. It baffles me.

@tim_g said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@fateknollogee That's not that simple. And you can't compare apple to carrots.

You can compare KVM and Xen. You can't compare XS and KVM.

In terms of "full stack" API, there is no "standard" for KVM. Everyone is doing is own stuff. That's not what I call a success

What exactly are you looking for with KVM? There are lots of ways to fully manage KVM... the best way is with CLI "virsh", and virt-manager.

Something like XAPI, but for KVM. Eg the get order of magnitude effort to add KVM into Xen Orchestra for example.

@scottalanmiller To be fair I had IBM mainframes in mind ^^

@fateknollogee Companies switch from various hypervisors for their own reasons, especially big ones (when you can get specific hardware from Intel, you are in a Top10 hardware user in general).

But there is also companies switching from KVM to Xen (eg Gandi, a relatively important hosting company): https://news.gandi.net/en/2017/07/a-more-xen-future/

So, as you can see, it's not binary. Xen is also very popular in embed world (automotive etc.), and China is also a powerful player now.

I'm not telling Xen is better. It's different: this is a microkernel that boot before Linux, with the good (sec, isolation) and the bad (less easy to understand/manage by default). It's also the oldest open source hypervisor!

So in the end, having multiple hypervisors is a good thing. Frankly, I don't care about the "bare" hypervisor market "behavior", it's already a commodity.

@fateknollogee That's not that simple. And you can't compare apple to carrots.

You can compare KVM and Xen. You can't compare XS and KVM.

In terms of "full stack" API, there is no "standard" for KVM. Everyone is doing is own stuff. That's not what I call a success

@fateknollogee said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

I'm not searching for a "complete" solution, I'm asking for an API to possibly use on top.

Beyond that, oVirt is a but ugly in some ways (probably because there is not "complete" native stack for KVM

I know you aren't looking for a complete solution.
I thought you might look at oVirt, see how they are doing whatever they do & then you would do it "better"

Last time I did, I had a headache and my eyes bleed for a week

Within ALL people using KVM in the world, nobody took time to make a valid API that's not a Rube Goldberg machine? (OpenStack or so) I can't understand that.

@tim_g said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@fateknollogee said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@Tim_G Will Kimchi display vm info from multiple hosts in a single pane? (I assume it's 1:1)

No it's per server basis. If it can, I'm not aware of it and haven't even had the thought to look or try.

That's even worse than I assumed

@fateknollogee said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:

@olivier Have you looked at oVirt + Gluster https://www.ovirt.org/blog/2017/04/up-and-running-with-ovirt-4.1-and-gluster-storage/

I'm not searching for a "complete" solution, I'm asking for an API to possibly use on top.

Beyond that, oVirt is a but ugly in some ways (probably because there is not "complete" native stack for KVM