oVirt pitfalls

After you use something for a bit, you notice the issues associated with it. While oVirt has solved my pain points of high availability, there are a few which stand out.

Logging in

To log in to oVirt for administration, you visit the landing page of the oVirt-engine website. This is perfect – it means I can administrate it from the web browser on my mobile phone. The issue comes when you actually need to log in – you have to click another link on the landing page to see the spot to enter your credentials. It would be nice if the landing page had the username and password fields and, after authentication, would bring up the appropriate view based on permissions (reporting, user, or admin view). Another thought is to have another drop-down box with the area to load right next to the profile to use. It could be that the design of the landing page is different than what I am used to, but there is clearly room for improvement.

Without DNS, the engine website doesn’t work

If you have your DNS server virtualized and the storage gluster goes into a rebuild mode, your oVirt engine doesn’t work. You can’t log in quickly, you can’t shutdown/turn on VMs, and you can’t select anything (if you have managed to log in). You have to resort to the cli interface in order to do anything! Apparently oVirt queries each server via DNS before it lets you type in the login fields. This is easily fixed by managing the hosts file on each server via Puppet, but it seems like bad IT practice to do this.

The web interface has too many tabs

This makes it difficult to tell co-workers how to operate the interface via email, sms, or telephone conversation. Often I find myself clicking through 5 tabs because I forgot how to get to a previous page. This could be from my inexperience with the interface, but I think it could be improved. This also makes it difficult to use on a mobile web browser.