The main issue with virt-manager is that it's a desktop application and you can't really collaborate with others when managing infrastructure.

Cockpit solves this issue. The feature set in slightly different but mainly it is limited as to what you can manage.

When running different types of infrastructure at the same time, e.g. KVM + AWS + Azure + ... it won't help much. In such cases it would make sense to check out Mist (https://github.com/mistio/mist-ce), which does something similar to Cockpit but for ~20 infra techs.

Virt-manager can connect simultaneously from many different terminals to many different libvirt servers. What do you mean by "you can't collaborate with others"?

I mean that you can't really have multiple people, from multiple teams, accessing the same infra with different types of rights and with centrally managed authentication/authorization/logging.

That's exactly what libvirt lets you do. It uses policykit to handle the authorization, cockpit doesn't change that and still requires you to use policykit to control who has access to what.

https://libvirt.org/aclpolkit.html

: /

One thing to note is that Cockpit is very tied to systemd. Doesn't work with alt inits.

Can you elaborate on this? Does cockpit include a handful of services/sockets that must be activated in sequence? Or does it rely on other parts of the systemd constellation

If you like this, you should really check out oVirt. It's the open upstream of RHV. It should look very familiar to you.

Red Hat obscure it a bit, presumably because there's very little difference from RHV (and might detract from sales), so the website is not so shiny. But play with it.

Red Hat really has gone all in on cockpit as well. It is very polished and pretty full featured, and continues to improve. Also very easy to setup on RHEL installations. When you login the MOTD actually has instructions on how to enable cockpit, that's how hard they're pushing it.

I gave it a shot, and it was able to see my running libvirt VM's although it could not create one due to an obscure error of not supporting the "custom" CPU type. The running VM's are running in full virtualization so it is probably just a minor bug in Cockpit, seeing that it is after all just a libvirtd frontend in this regard. Aside from that, Cockpit looks fairly stable and it has potential, but keep in mind it is very simple.

> RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager

For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

> For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

By whom? The vast majority of contributions are paid for by Red Hat [0].

[0]: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/graphs/contribu...

Phew!

That's awesome, thanks for the share.

For my homelab I use proxmox on a couple of machines and it works great for managing containers (in terms of LXC containers that would be more of a traditional VM) and it works great. Most people/companies don't need the complexities that come with Kubernetes or other tools like that.

cockpit has many "applications" including cockpit-podman to manage containers :

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman

This is the Cockpit user interface for podman containers.

It is being actively developed and has not yet reached feature parity with cockpit-docker. For now you can do basic image and container tasks for both system and user containers.

> RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager:

Sweet, now security bugs in the same-origin-policy can root my virtual machine!

I really wish RedHat would make a competitor to VirtualBox.

QEMU / KVM and either virt-manager or cockpit is that competitor.

What software do you use to back up the virtual machines?

We're currently trying to replace our proprietary backup software by using libvirt snapshot-create-as/blockcommit and borgbackup on raw image.

  virsh snapshot-create-as ... --disk-only
  borg create .... vmimage.raw
  virsh blockcommit ... --active --pivot

borgbackup does compression and deduplication and has a simple command line and excellent documentation (and IRC channel :).

https://www.borgbackup.org/

guestfish/libguestfs is then used if you need specific files within an image instead of a complete restore.

https://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html

Example dump the name of all files on all filesystems:

   guestfish --ro -i -a vmimage.raw find /

Can be used to check integrity post backup too, and may be we'll add some file indexing tools.