One of the major highlights of OpenNebula 7.4 “Helix” is undoubtedly the new Sunstone GUI with: Cleaner navigation Richer visualizations Streamlined workflows
A simpler, faster, and more intuitive way to manage modern infrastructure.
To help you get started, we’ve prepared a screencast that showcases the redesigned Sunstone interface and demonstrates the core workflows for managing infrastructure and virtual machines with OpenNebula.
Whether you’re evaluating OpenNebula for the first time or upgrading to the latest release, this guided tour provides a practical introduction to the platform.
See New Sunstone in Action
What do you like about the new GUI? Share your thoughts in the comment below!
I have just upgraded to 7.4. For me the GUI looks definitely better than in 7.2, but still lacking compared to the Ruby version. It also feels much slower than in 7.2 for some reason. Listing all the VMs and entering few letters to a search box feels like eternity. It takes about 15-20 seconds when I open the Instances → VMs page, enter something to the search box, and wait for the search results.
There are some usability problems, for example:
I want to instantiate an existing template. There is an input box where I can modify the size of memory for the new VM. I click to the input box, press backspace to delete the existing number (I had 4 GB there), and want to write a new number. However, after emptying the input box, there appears “0” instead, and then - this is the UX bug - the “GB” selector gets silently changed to “MB”. So I write 8 instead of 0 which used to be 4, and without noticing this, I get the VM with 8 MB instead of 8 GB RAM, which obviously does not boot.
Another one is the quota dialog in the Admin view (System → Users → Quotas): Most of the page is occupied by a strange colourful thing, which in fact represents all the quotas stacked on top of each other. There is a numeric value on the left side, which does not mean anything, as it is probably taken as a sum of all the stacked bars: CPUs + VMs + Memory +… According to it, I have a quota of about 180000 of something, which is sum of apples and oranges. Totally meaningless. And discovering which quotas are in fact set for a given user is impossible without walking through the individual fields manually. Please bring back the dialog with all quotas visible and editable in one page.
Generally speaking, the Fireedge pages have lots of unnecessary free space. I have quite large screen (2560x1600), browser set up to 130 % zoom occupying more than half of my horizontal screen space (vertically it is maximized), and yet the list of VMs does not fit there and the horizontal scroll bar needs to be used. As one of my colleagues stated: “The new Sunstone is like looking at a large and complex device through a keyhole”.
I have many more, but for now please consider these. Thanks!
We appreciate your valuable feedback on the re-designed Fireedge!
Yes, some bugs have been already found including the one which slows down the Fireedge.
OpenNebula subscribers already have access to some fixes through the Support Portal. For the broader user community, these fixes will be included in the next public community edition release.
OK, should I write other usability reports here, or somewhere else? Further usability issues I ran into:
I want to reboot the whole cluster, so I call onehost flush for individual nodes, and want to verify the progress. So I open Infrastructure->Hosts page in Sunstone, click on that host, which is disabled, and the “VMs” tab in it. All the VMs are displayed as “Running”, even though when I click on the line of a particular VM, in the pop-up window there is “Migrate” state. So I cannot monitor the progress, the VMs are not displayed as being migrated.
I cannot also refresh the list of VMs, there is no refresh button and it does not refresh by itself. I have to close the pop-up with the list, the pop-up with the particular host, and then hit refresh in the main Infrastructure->Hosts page, and return back to the host and the list of its VM.
Generally the pop-up pages do not have the refresh button.
The Reload button in browser is not usable in Sunstone, as the state of the Sunstone page is not reflected in the URL. I cannot for example copy the URL of a Sunstone page displaying the VM info from the URL bar and send it to anoter user with “Have a look at this VM”.
Interestingly enough, the list of VMs on a particular host is much more compact than the list in Instances->VMs. It would be nice if the Instances->VMs list can look the same, without unnecessary white space between lines.
Cleaner navigation
Richer visualizations
Streamlined workflows