Re: Proposed plan for the Virtualization Getting Started Guide

[Glen Rundblom <glen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,
So one of the comments I was working on in boxes was including some libvrt commands that will also show some of Boxes files / infrastructure. If they are covered elsewhere maybe its not a good idea to put those in the boxes section?

Thanks,
-Glen

On 03/17/2015 03:31 PM, Sandra McCann wrote:

Thanks Dayle!

I took a look at your RHEL quickstart and the flow is quite similar to what I'm proposing.  I had a few comments:

 - yum install - does RHEL support yum groupinstall? That's what I was going to document instead of the individual installs.  I have a small section after that to describe what some of the packages do (for the curious newbie :-)

 - screencaps - I debated this one and was leaning toward only having one or two for virt-manager. Most of the steps are obvious when you look at the virt-manager gui, so I thought I could get away with less images to create/maintain.  That said, your approach makes it very obvious what screen the user should be on, so now I'm waffling on which approach to take.

 - other options to spin up a VM - I mention some of the other options in a list, just so the newbie user is aware. I figure only virt-manager and boxes will actually be covered in detail, and the rest would be in the admin/deploy guide.

 - boxes - I'm guessing this is only in Fedora, not RHEL?  Anyway, I'm leaning toward having boxes as the first procedure to cover, since it's installed by default in Fedora workstation, where the newbie user is.  Then a separate chapter for virt-manager.

Thanks,

Sandra

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 10:16 PM, Dayle Parker <dayleparker@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hey Sandra,

Thanks for initiating this! I help maintain this guide for RHEL and have sadly been too busy lately to get very involved on the Fedora side of things. :(

I've been also looking at whether this book has the right user in mind for RHEL, and I think currently it's aimed at too many types of users -- I agree, the novice/GUI focus sounds best. I think some of this guide gets pretty technical and detailed in parts, and is probably not needed for a novice user.

I've actually added a quick start chapter to the end of the guide [1] for RHEL7, so if you want to use any of it (the content is under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license), go for it. (Or if you have any feedback on that chapter as a novice, feel free to share).

Also, let me know if you need any help with the project -- I really appreciate you taking it on, and I'm happy to contribute in little bits if I can!

Cheers,
Dayle



[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Getting_Started_Guide/chap-Virtualization_Getting_Started-Quickstart.html

On 03/17/2015 11:03 AM, Glen Rundblom wrote:

I agree with the plan, and I am happy that Sandra proposed this direction. I have been thinking of how to word my Boxes guide: is this a how-to manual, or just just technical instructions. For me: I learn more from how-to manuals and branch into technical details as I need them. Also, working with the Novice in mind makes me think of the "what if the person does not see..." or "what if they encounter that" and try to solve issues they may encounter as they try to do the task, but may not have the ability to troubleshoot an issue that just happened during the process.

Also, writing for Novices/How-to is more forgiving of first and second person voicing, which I have a tendency to do.

So I have been working with the mindset of a how-to manual for someone beginning with the application, because I am learning the application, publican, docbook, git, mailing lists, and Linux all together!)

I have this conception that the more friendly and built for novices something is, the more solid and polished it seems. I am more then willing to put more time and work to make to do that.

So, thank you Sandra!

-Glen

On 03/16/2015 05:51 PM, Pete Travis wrote:

On 03/16/2015 02:28 PM, Sandra McCann wrote:

Hi folks -

We’ve been batting around ideas for the virtualization guides for a bit now in irc, but I’d like to get some more feedback on the approach we can take.

Seems there are two personas involved. Using our draft personas we have :

• Technical Tony - experienced IT person virtualizing on servers etc, knows his stuff and is spinning up VMs like they’re candy.

• Novice Ned (or Novice Nancy in my case :-) - Fairly new to virtualization, and looking to spin up a VM or two for her own work.

Given these two personas, I’d like to suggest that the Virtualization Getting Started guide be targeted to Novice Nancy. To do this we would:

• Add an installing virtualization tools chapter - simple effort to install the virtualization group package and bring up virt-manager. (smccann)

• Add an ‘Creating Guests with Virt-Manager chapter - copying from here. (smccann)

• Adding a ‘Creating Guests with Boxes chapter (grundblom)

• Make minor edits as needed to remove Fedora 19 references and any references (if present) to a larger set of virtualization guides that may not be available as F21 guides yet.

I also had one question -

• not sure what to do about the list of emulated devices - is it accurate? http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/19/html/Virtualization_Getting_Started_Guide/sec-virtualized-hardware-devices.html

Anyway, I’d like to get the getting started done and committed before considering the Admin and Deploy guide (because..ahem.. I AM Novice Nancy here and it will take longer for me to parse that guide).

Thoughts?

Sandra

This seems like a solid plan to me.  There's a lot of content in the guide now that's reads strictly as a launch point for the larger guides, so something more like purging paragraphs might be more appropriate than simply removing references.  You have a good idea of where you want to go with it; I only make that point to ensure you don't feel obligated to keep the existing content and write around it.

The hardware list is accurate, but not complete.  You might want to focus on a few specific pieces of hardware instead of listing and explaining all possible options though, ie:

    This is how you add a network device.  This virtio option might need these extra drivers on a windows guest. 

    This is how you add a virtual block device. This virtio option might need these extra drivers on a windows guest. ( depending on how deep you want to go, you could cover switching out a windows installation iso for the virtio driver iso so it can see virtio storage, then switching back.  There's a definite performance improvement in virtio over SATA emulation, but the setup is going to add a page or two to your instructions)

    This is how you provide an ISO to the guest.

    This is how you share part of the host filesystem with a linux guest

    These are all spice related devices.  If you choose spice ( the default ) you get them automatically, here is what they do.



Things like memory, CPU, input devices are set up automatically, or during initial creation.  IMO my the time you have documented the device types that might need some explanation, the user is familiar with the device management screen and knows where to go, they don't need much or any explanation.

Your plan seems GUI focused; I like that.  It makes for a much easier read for new users when it doesn't look like you need to learn a bunch of scary programming to make it work :)  We can put cli stuff somewhere else.

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leadt
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-- 
Dayle Parker
Senior Technical Writer
Red Hat Asia Pacific - Brisbane, Australia
dayleparker@xxxxxxxxxx 

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