Cockpit-Machine - Can it Replace Virt-Manager?
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- Опубликовано: 20 июл 2024
- Cockpit-Machine is an open source virtualization add-on to Cockpit for Linux. RedHat deprecated virt-manager in RHEL 8, however the project is still alive and well according to many Linux sources, however it has not seen any activity since the 4.10 release over a year ago. I moved to virt-manager when I could not get enough performance out of Oracle's Virtualbox. The GUI to virt-manager is a bit dated, and is in sad need of an overall. I decided to check out what Cockpit-Machines had to offer and this video is my first experience playing around with it and using it.
The short answer to the question is, "I do not know" - I never do when first starting to use something, it takes time to get to know the ins and outs of the software, where its strengths are and where it falls down on the job. The lines have blurred between a typical Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor today, but this one is clearly a type 2., just like virt-manager. Cockpit-Machines like its predecessor uses the same KVM/QEMU core that virt-manager used. Both are a step up from the complex configuration of KVM and QEMU.
One last thing /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf holds the configuration for both vnc and spice, you will see both default to localhost only, but you can change it here and it will allow your VMs to work over the network. One word of caution, if you are wanting to use vnc or spice over an open network (Internet), you will need to setup TLS and X.509 certificates to protect your session and your VMs while accessing them.
You can find out more about setting up TLS and X.509 certs here: cockpit-project.org/guide/lat...
AI thumbnail is a B&W image of a CPU which the generative AI apparently thought that having large numbers of antenna would somehow be cool...probably not, and the added noise factor would not be welcome.
Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:14 - Cockpit-Machine
01:13 - Cockpit-Machines
01:33 - Outro
01:57 - VM - Storage Pools
03:10 - VM Networks
04:15 - Virtual Machines
04:22 - Importing and Existing VM
05:44 - Create a New Virtual Machine
07:35 - Change VM Resources
08:17 - Add Host Devices (Pass Through)
08:34 - VM Snapshots
09:09 - VM Cloning
11:26 - Wrapup
Gear I used to make these videos
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AMD Rysen Machine (Currently Unplugged)
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Odroid N2+
Raspberry Pi 4
Intel Nuc 10 - amzn.to/46e6l15
Intel Nuc 12 - amzn.to/3NCYxPj
Network
Aruba Instant On 1930 24-Port Gb Ethernet - amzn.to/46e6l15
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Panasonic GH4 Camera
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Audio Equipment
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#VM #Virtual #Machines @Linux#Redhat 
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Due to the recent RedHat announcement, I am retracting the video, and ending all use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for development. To that end, I can no longer recommend using Cock Pit, I invite you to watch my next video explaining this direction
Interesting. I currently use Proxmox and have barely gotten used to it. VirtualBox was more intuitive for me, but i needed a real hypervisor and didnt like the way that Hyper-V works. I liked the simple UI of Cockpit but I do a lot of hardware passthrough stuff and that tends to work best with Proxmox.
I've seen both videos, yeah but Proxmox Web UI isn't docker compatible by default, so what do you suggest ? proxmox + portainer ?
Cockpit is very limited especially if you doing GPU passthrough or other none standard stuff than you have to go back to editing xml files by hand. I hope community will keep virt-manager alive. It's the best graphical tool for quickly creating virtual machines available.
so far they are although its been awhile since its been touched (Aug 2022)
Based on what you've said reasonable expectation would be that VirtMan will remain in contention until it is no longer relevant which would require that cockpit addresses VirtMan functionality; VirtMan will probably still persist well after cockpit becomes comparably comprehensive most likely getting updates itself bringing it inline with cockpit before it would be dropped and that deprecation would most likely be exclusive to the UI aspects (presentation and management). I wouldn't get to worried about VirtMan prevalence diminishing just yet.
@@NOPerative No doubt, I see this a lot today with people adapting what is essentially command line interface driven configuration like KVM/QEMU, the folks who did virt-manager put most of that into the GUI, the cockpit-machine folks have about...ohhh maybe 30% of it in the GUI and the rest back out to the command line, now that doesn't bother me, I live in the command line, but for others that would be a serious limitation, and I can see that.
GPU passthrough isn't virtualisation anyway - it's purely a "kludge" to keep self-entitled Linux gamer-brats happy.
@@CyberGizmo I use command line a lot , virsh is an excellent tool. However what is the point of the GUI tool if you're forced to fallback into CLI anyway? I often see people using virtual box on linux desktop probably don't even knowing about virt-manager. Virt-manager is a real gem. it was used as an real life example when Microsoft enabled GUI applications in WSL2 and people were asking why do you need this functionality anyway.
Thanks for a good introduction to cockpit as a front end for qemu/kvm virtualization 👍🏻 Would be interesting with a walkthrough of setting up a Debian 12 virtualization server with good storage setup, bridged networking to virtual machines and spice remote viewer. Perhaps test if cockpit can be used for all (most) of the setup? 😊
oh great have used the old virt-man UI for years this is just what I needed
You are a true gem of the internet.
Useful. Will be rebuilding my home infrastructure next year, and I admit I wasn't looking forward to setting up virt-manager again - now I don't have to worry, looks like this will make it easy. There will be some containerisation too when I do, so looking forward tot he podman vid too.
There will be more videos coming, some of the more advanced stuff which is handled by Proxmox is left up to a journey to the command line, but thanks I am glad you enjoyed the video
Nice! Back in 1999 I started using VMware Workstation to run Windows NT 4.0 on Linux on my SMP workstation, and thought it was pretty neat. Now I'm hoping to do the same thing, but with KVM & QEMU, so I can fire up a copy of Windows to run the few programs that only run on Windows, and to try out other Linux distros. When we had Citrix, one great trick it could do was to publish individual applications through the Citrix client. I'd love to have that, where I could run applications from my workstation machine and have them display on my laptop (as X does) no matter where I was. But without the Citrix price tag.
With the price of VMWare going the way it has, I highly suspect this will become a popular tool for Linux users.
I was looking for a virtmanager replacement. I ended up with LXD, their VM Support got really good and and the cli is really good
I would have taken that approach too, but I hate that "client TLS certificate for authentication" thing. Which is very, very limiting the remote administration. Unless it's sticking out right in the internet, but if you're using reverse proxy...
Would be great if you could cover VM migration
Funny you brought up this subject. I have been struggling to get cockpit-machines working properly on any distro that supports it. What I want to do is make alma my base/host system, and run truenas core as a vm with my hba card as a passthrough. The install goes great, but I can't get the installed system to boot at all. Has anyone had a similar experience?
Cockpit looks better than the techno jargon in Virt-Manager, on the other hand IBM/Red Hat is unreliable with respect to the support for their products (virt-manager & Red Hat Linux). I use Virtualbox, since its time in Sun Microsystems (2009) and I never had a reason to move to another hypervisor. Oracle took over in Jan 2010 from Sun. Oracle is a reliable company, because they keep improving and maintaining their products, unlike IBM/Red Hat. My oldest VM (Windows XP Home) is installed and activated in March 2010 and I still use it every week! Which 13 year's old installation do you still use?
By the way I collected ~70 VMs, all Windows releases from 1987 (1.04) till 2022 (11 Pro) and all Ubuntu LTS releases and many other Linux distros (somewhat old and new); FreeBSD; MS-DOS; DR-DOS and OS/2 Warp :) :)
Just one problem with Virtualbox, its Intel/AMD ONLY, no support for RISC-V or ARM
It's important to realize that virt-manager depreciation started in 2020
I used to have a debian server running kvm vms on which i worked remotely and its pretty good, used it extensively and had no need to use a monitor
On debian i used it from backports which is a bit a pain, but still very very useful and even works on mobile
I dislike having to use the browser for the VM, for me that is clumsy because I already have the browser open for other pages, often 2 or 3 instances (one extra ordinary and one private) of Firefox.
it's for headless
@@vipvip-tf9rw it can launch browser based vnc connections as well. Cockpit has some nice things, but it's definitely not viable as a standalone tool nor comparable to a more fleshed-out system. A closer comparison would be something like truenas scale, which also has a pretty basic but functional gui front end. Regardless of how you bring virtual machines to life, I don't think anyone would actually use the virtual machines tool to use them day to day, there's ssh, rdp, vnc, etc for that.
I want to explore more options besides proxmox but i dont know if the features proxmox offers and does well out of the box can be so easily replaced, like clustering, ceph, live migrations, incremental backups with PBS, etc..
That is essentially what I am doing, Proxmox is a very good platform for virtual machines and LXC containers, my only reason for looking is I am running out of host machine resources and I don’t want to dedicate another x86 machine to Proxmox
Why is it that when I just get used to a particular user interface, someone decides to change it?
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - and virt-manager "ain't broke".
Its still around, just not on RHEL 8 and above
is there a way to handle lxc in cockpit without the need to use proxmox?
I think so, I saw some configuration notes in the guide for LXC
Any reason for leaving Proxmox? Does RHEL going close source make you question this choice?
Thanks for the insightful content.
I saw that notice this morning, RedHat continues to open mouth and insert foot. At the moment I am testing cockpit-machines to see how well it works, I guess there is always vagrant....:). Oh, there is nothing I dislike about Proxmox, just running out of steam on the box its hosted on
I really like xcp-ng as a hypervisor. It handles some things exceptionally well.
But.... It's not very user friendly. I'm not comfortable using it in production. Easy to misconfigure, and sometimes beyond my ability to repair.
I used xcp-ng quite awhile until one upgrade where it blew itself up, destroyed all the VMs and even corrupted the backups, my fault for not performing the upgrade correctly but I agree it can be very confusing at times,
I have a real love/hate relationship with it lol
I tried to use Cockpit for the virtual machines a while ago and couldn't get it working.. it couldn't see any of the machines, while "virsh list" worked and everything..
Dammit.. they're removing the great virt-manager, the thing that works quickly, smoothly etc.. then replaces it with a backwards website rubbish cockpit.. God damn it IBM, stop this!!
RedHat is just deprecating it for RHEL, the virt-manager project is still being maintained by the community so no worries so far. That's the nice thing about open source, someone does something stupid, we fork it :)
doesn't clustering servers require a license?
on proxmox? the HA part yes, the clustering part no
Please do a more in depth review/tutorial. I am thinking about moving from proXmoX too :)