1.290. virt-manager

1.290.1. RHBA-2011:0637: bug fix and enhancement update

An updated virt-manager package that provides bug fixes and adds enhancements is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) is a graphical tool for administering virtual machines for KVM, Xen, and QEMU. virt-manager can start, stop, add or remove virtualized devices, connect to a graphical or serial console, and view resource usage statistics for existing virtualized guests on local or remote machines. It uses the libvirt API.

The virt-manager package has been upgraded to upstream version 0.8.6, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version.

Interesting enhancements include:

Option to configure guest CPU model, including an option to mimic host CPU in the guest, which can greatly improve performance. (BZ#647306)
Option to configure CPU topology (sockets, cores, threads). This enables using more CPUs with OS which have a support limit on sockets (the default vcpu type).
Cancellation and progress reporting for 'Save' and 'Migrate' operations.
Option to see the error message if a hotplug operation fails. This can be useful in determining if hotplug for the specified device type is supported and failure was expected. (BZ#613546)
Use of ICH6 sound device model by default.

Interesting bug fixes include:

Previously, if selecting 'Customize before install' at the end of the 'New VM' wizard and the install process failed, any custom changes made were forgotten if the installation was re-run. This is now fixed. (BZ#619894)
Previously, the 'New VM' wizard incorrectly capped maximum guest memory at 32GB. This limitation has been removed. (BZ#640781)

All users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 should upgrade to these updated packages.