Kimchi: HTML5 management interface for KVM | Hacker News Reader

Kimchi: HTML5 management interface for KVM

github.com

69 pointsashitlerferad25 comments

Seems interesting. I have not seen CherryPy mentioned for a while since sabnzbd.

If anyone else is curious, like I was, about why one would choose it over, say Flask, or whatever the new Pythonic Sinatra-esque hotness is, they have very good and minimalist docs, with a solid list of bullet points as to why.

http://docs.cherrypy.org/en/latest/intro.html

I might give Wok, the Kimchi middleware they use for building REST and APIs and pairing it with HTML5 frontends, a go, as this all comes together well.

Kimchi is a very good Korean dish, as @Bino says. This does not look like it will disappoint either! I was interested in giving Fedora a go again, and the polish of Cockpit is nice, but the fact it is written in C sadly means it is well over my head.

Kimchi started AFAIR as a lightweight replacement for oVirt. I remember this from a meeting at IBM research about 3 years ago. Great to see it is well maintained!

Aren't Flask and CherryPy very similar, in that they're minimalist 'micro' web frameworks with very little scaffolding? You kinda make it sound like Flask is some passing fad. It's been out for over six years now...

Anyhoo thanks for the link. I'll be checking out CherryPy at some point as I much prefer minimalist frameworks.

I hardly would call Flask a fad. That was not my intent. I was saying everyone talks about Flask. I rarely see, in my perusal of the tubes, mention of CherryPy anymore. I was actually listening to Chris McDonough, original developer of Pyramids/Pylons, talk with the host about the "frenemy" that is Flask. I myself forgot how many of the micro frameworks in Python (Pyramids, bottle, Flask, CherryPy, others I forget) really are in the same general age group.

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/3/pyramid-web-fram...

Mea culpa.

Comparison with https://www.ovirt.org/ ?

I believe it's related in some way, but I cannot for the life of me find the direct connection. I can tell you that kimchi developer contacts all use @ovirt.org emails and mailing lists.

https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/wiki/Communications

Maybe it's a next gen UI for ovirt?

Kimchi project was started by the same IBM developers in Beijing that were contributing to oVirt.

Very nice folks I must say. It was a pleasure to collaborate with them in oVirt.

Recommended system requirements for a decent oVirt installation are huge by comparison with Kimchi's. However, Kimchi is much less configurable than oVirt. So far as I can make out, oVirt is best suited for clustered virtualization whilst Kimchi aims mainly for single server virtualization. At least, that's how I'm using it and it seems to work well. I asked our sys admin whether oVirt would work for my HP MicroSever and he said something more lightweight would be better.

I currently manage an oVirt installation and was surprised to see almost 20GB of memory allocated on the management node before I had a single VM spun up. It's not light, but it is powerful. Makes resizing disks, setting up networks, connecting to storage domains (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, etc), migrating VMs, logging, and many other common tasks very easy to do. The latest release, 4.0 has a beautiful dashboard that gives you a quick overview of your pool of resources.

Finally, every guest OS I've run has a build of an ovirt agent that reports back to the management node on its configuration (installed software, cpu/mem/io usage, ip addresses, hostname, etc).

I suspect that 20GB is probably down to the JBoss and/or JVM parameters which are sized for running a datacenter.

They don't really work at the same scale.

Kimchi is for managing a single host. Ovirt is aimed at managing datacenters, so it handles things like network, clusters, etc.

Probably a better comparison is to virt-manager, which is also single-node management, albeit as a native (Python + Gtk) app. https://virt-manager.org/

The author incorrectly uses "KVM" in both the title and text when they should use "libvirt" or "QEMU". This is, unfortunately, very common.

To be honest, the only practical reason for me to use KVM instead of VirtualBox (which I'm already using via Vagrant too) is I have more control over "low-level" features, eg. I can setup VGA passthrough.

But it seems they don't allow such features, and "don't have plans to allow the user to add any custom parameter to the VMs"?

Great work nonetheless.

Edit: I understand my use case is not exactly what they're looking for.

The config files for each distro seem to hardcode a mirror for each. Wouldn't it be better to have mirror configuration independent of distro configuration?

Edit: discussed in https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/issues/611

Food tips: Kimchi is also a very good korean side dish :)

This looks great. Obviously you'd need to have a KVM setup installed, but is there any other requirements for this, such as mysql, etc?

Doesn't look like it, the listed dependencies are just qemu, libvirt and some python libs.

https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/blob/master/docs/ub...

> Obviously you'd need to have a KVM setup installed,

what is a "KVM setup"? any Linux distro on compatible hardware[1] is a KVM setup. You do need the qemu package installed, but that's hardly a "setup".

[1] most (if not all) new systems, the hardest thing is enabling it in the BIOS I guess.

so Kimchi provides GuestOS management or you can also see the various kinds of stats about the running/available Guest OS? if you are showing stats, how are you retrieving them?

At least with oVirt, agent software is installed in the guest that speaks to the oVirt manager.

Lol what is KVM thanks for the no link on the readme.

Dear Internet, can we stop using acronyms without defining them first? Thanks.

I don't know why you were downvoted, perhaps for the "lol". Anyway yes we should explain what acronyms mean. The README would be improved by a link from "KVM" to http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page or wikipedia.

> I don't know why you were downvoted, perhaps for the "lol"

Thank you for adding the link. Yes, personality doesn't add to the conversation according to the mods. Sigh. One needs a safe zone from even the mildest trolling.

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