Is Cockpit the solution?

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I am doing sysAdmin for a WISP. Linux was supposed to be a driving reason for me being hired, but in reality the owner/engineer/architect does not want to spend time in a shell. He runs Windoze, and wants to administer from Windoze. I need to admin from Linux through and through for sanity’s sake.

A couple months back we demo’d Cockpit on a CEntOS 7 install, and it was lacking. However, on the CEntOS/RHEL 8 and Fedora 31 installs it has moved the needle quite a bit.

A major solution he is looking for is the ability to manage virtual machines from a web or application interface much like VMWare. This was the inspiring feature addition that makes Cockpit look like a promising solution.

I have spent a lot of time in Virtual Machine Manager, but I have very little experience with VMWare or the capabilities of the interface. Will Cockpit’s virtual machine management features hold weight with the VMWare of yesteryear to allow cross-platform administrative management of our Linuxy daemons?

Thanks for the show Eric and Brandon!

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Doesn’t oVirt have a nice pretty interface?

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Thanks for the question!

oVirt would be a great option. Though, Cockpit in RHEL8/Fedora is MUCH improved. I use it for managing VMs on my local host. In fact, Virtual Machine Manager is being replaced by Cockpit.

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I’ve been keeping a distance eye on Cockpit. Maybe it’s time to upgrade the home lab Linux server from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 and take another look at Cockpit.

I can’t run oVirt on my server because oVirt does not support AMD cpu’s. It didn’t last time I checked ( about a year ago ), so that might have changed. I’ve been using virt-manager and some plugin I found that allows me to authenticate remotely so that I can manage VM’s from my laptop ( Linux-based ).

@Abstract_Penguin keep us updated as I’m curious to learn about the solution you end up deploying.

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Will do. I am swamped with field and tower work at the moment. But, once we get the hardware in we will be building all new machines.

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Umm. . . The co-owner had such a good deal on a server. . . so good, it was too good to be true.

Still waiting on hardware to be ordered lol.

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I didn’t know ovirt doesn’t support AMD CPUs. Is that just newer ones or older ones too? I have a pre-Ryzen desktop as a home server but it has Ubuntu and I was thinking of changing moving to CentOS base and using Ovirt to get a few VMs on it.

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If it’s too good to be true…what’s the catch? Is the server EOL?

Proxmox and XenServer are alternatives with web gui’s but I think oVirt and/or Cockpit would be better solutions.

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If you are considering updating to CentOS 8, It might be worth your time to also consider deploying something else like Openshift 4 or K3s with Kubevirt.

You can still run VMs, but the control plan is K8s, so you can also dive into K8s stuff as well.

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How many hosts are you planning to manage and is it all going to run virtual machines?

Standalone KVM use cockpit, it is awesome and it gets new features every 2 weeks that really improve the experience.

If you are planning on clustering with Live Migration and shared storage you need to take a good look at oVirt or KubeVirt running on OpenShift or OKD.

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