Feature requests re. virtualization

[ebrandsberg]

In working with TrueNas to provide virtualization for a larger number of VM's, I had some ideas:

1. Allow grouping of VMs in folders in the virtualization tab, possibly via tags?
2. When creating a VM zvol, since there is currently a limit of 63 characters, allow mapping longer paths to a placeholder hash, which would be discoverable from the UI, so that long names can be used without making a longer path.
3. When cloning a VM, avoid copying the entire name of the clone source, again to prevent going over the name length.
4. Adjust the position of the libvirt-sock so that virt-manager can easily connect and be used to manage VMs as well. Currently it is in /run/trunenas_libvirt/ but this is not the standard location for it. Even putting in a symbolic link with
[/var/run/libvirt]# ln -s ../truenas_libvirt/libvirt-sock libvirt-sock
works to enable this. That said, cloning of VMs through virt-manager doesn't appear to work...

 

[jgreco]

In working with TrueNas to provide virtualization for a larger number of VM's, I had some ideas:

1. Allow grouping of VMs in folders in the virtualization tab, possibly via tags?
2. When creating a VM zvol, since there is currently a limit of 63 characters, allow mapping longer paths to a placeholder hash, which would be discoverable from the UI, so that long names can be used without making a longer path.
3. When cloning a VM, avoid copying the entire name of the clone source, again to prevent going over the name length.
4. Adjust the position of the libvirt-sock so that virt-manager can easily connect and be used to manage VMs as well. Currently it is in /run/trunenas_libvirt/ but this is not the standard location for it. Even putting in a symbolic link with
[/var/run/libvirt]# ln -s ../truenas_libvirt/libvirt-sock libvirt-sock
works to enable this. That said, cloning of VMs through virt-manager doesn't appear to work...

Welcome to the forums.

In an effort to avoid any misunderstanding of the realities here, I'm just going to say this, and ask you to accept it as intended constructively. The developers rarely visit "Developer's Corner" and I do not recall any case ever where a feature suggestion posted in the forums resulted in a new feature in the product. This is a community forum and is almost exclusively user-to-user based messaging. I'm not an iXsystems employee, for example.

The possibly not-entirely-obvious way to suggest a feature is to use the "Report a Bug" link (here in the forums) or on your NAS go to the webUI under System->Support and then select the type of "Feature". You will need to sign up for a Jira account. The developers are pretty good about triaging Jira issues and you are more likely to get some sort of feedback or acknowledgment through that mechanism.

Please don't shoot the messenger. I'm just trying to advocate for you to be heard.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Being as it's very VM-related, I'm assuming this a feature request for SCALE.

1. Are you looking for something more akin to a traditional hypervisor overview such as the "VMs and Templates" view in the VMware product line?



2. Does this still exist? I was under the impression that some recent changes increased the limit to 255 characters - but that might only be in CORE, as I think it was a FreeBSD-based limitation before.

3. Suffixing -clone or similar is a typical thing, but if we can resolve #2 above this will be ameliorated by the 255-char length certainly.

4. Dropping a symlink in a folder should be an easy fix, but for the second part, wrapping virt-clone with something that can handle creating a new zvol + snapshotting the existing machine (mandatory if it's running) and then presenting that snapshot as a read-only source for virt-clone to copy will be significantly more challenging.

But all told, these are all good suggestions/enhancements. They'll require varying degrees of effort to implement; and while the iX team is around the forum, opening a Jira ticket using the methods @jgreco outlined is the best way to get discussions started in a trackable manner.