[xen-tools] Re: difference between xen-shell and argo

[Henning Sprang]

On 12/2/06, Steve Kemp <steve at steve.org.uk> wrote:
> [...]
>    a)  Argo is dead.

Any guess when there will be anything useful rewritten version?

>   Argo, by contrast, is designed to allow an administrator to
>  perform similar operations on *arbitrary* domU running on a single
>  xen host.  Whilst there are facilities to create a per-user login
>  that is just a nice bonus.

Hmm, from what I read now, some comments:

- xen-shell seems to be unique against other available tools because
it has this possibility to restrict users to a single (is it really a
single, or is it all domU's that belong to a user? Do you really
assume each user has exactly one domU? why?) domU, and that it applies
these restrictions to installation/starting/stopping/console access of
the domU.

That's great.
Ah, wait, maybe dtc-xen is a similar tools, but it seems a bit
difficult to setup for these functions, with the dependency against
dtc itself. Don't know if it has a console, though.

- argo seems similar to a lot of other tools: virt-manager,
xenman/convirt, I'm not sure if SuSE Yast and XenEnterprise also have
similar functions.

And, I think all of them(the argo-similars) ignore the fact that a lot
of environments need the thing only xen-shell offers - a big machine
in a big company that is shared by multiple departments does need
separate logins and permissions for the admins of the departments -
they are not trusted by the master admin and nedd to have full control
over all functions of their domains, but not more.
(just an example, another one is development teams, where developers
get full permissions for all dev machines for their project, and other
developers only for their project's machines - and the admin doesn't
need to do anything when they want to re- install or restart the
machine.)

But a GUI for xen-shell would be great, and the mentioned
functionality for xen-shell - to control all systems one owns, which
can be more than just one on a single point would be great.

>   I hope that helps clarify things ..

A bit on the one hand (I don't need to mention argo in my presentation
next week), more question on the other hand, as you can see.

Did you think about to unify/merge argo and xen-shell? It sounds like
just a little bit more is needed in xen-shell, and argo can be
forgotten - with the result that you have only one project to
maintain, and not need to implement similar functions twice.
(please don't hate me for throwing your projects in the trash out of
misunderstanding the concepts in case I missed something! :) )


Henning