XO situation report

Happy new year! 2014 will be a great year for XO, because we plan to release the first stable version with professional support. Before that, our next objective is the last alpha version (alpha 3), and probably a beta after.

Today, let's make a report of our work. We manage, since October, to redesign all the application from both sides: a completely new interface and usage of AngularJS instead of Backbone. All this work is in the "next-release" branch in our repository. And believe me, it was a lot to do! (for Xo-web, we are almost 200 commits above the previous version). In consequence, this new design allows us to:

• solve a LOT of bugs due to our new powerful data-model
• display more informations in less views
• reduce maintenance and complexity
• be faster in new feature implementation

Working stuff

I can say now that our current work have no regression from the previous release, and brings new features:

• more informations displayed for each object
• globally a better interface
• a search bar perfectly working, allowing a instant search on anything (IP of your VM, name of your SR, type of SR, you name it!)
• link between each object (when you are on an host view, you can see its attached SR, click on it and you're on the SR page)
• visualization tools (toolbar with space occupied by its VDI in a SR, another toolbar with RAM of VM on an host)
• quick button to interact with your VM (stop, start, console view etc.)
  I'll try to do a demo in video as soon as I can.

Plan

Our features left for releasing this new version are (in order):

1. VM creation (we just started to work on it)
2. existing objects modification (e.g change the description or the name of an host or vm)
3. some UI improvement on main view (e.g allow bulk actions on VM's)
4. tags management
   We have 4 weeks to do so, but the priority is to provide at least the possibility to do basic Xen tasks (so the 2 first features are important). We are also thinking about how we can offer commercial support. This support will be our best resource to dedicate all our work on XO (we'll post something about that in next weeks).

After that

The next "next-release" (release-ception) objectives are (no order):

• permissions for each objects (RBAC model)
• console proxy
• external user source (open-ldap, AD)
• collecting metrics with RRD and display graphics in the interface

And long-term ideas are still here: if we collect enough metrics, we can automate XO to take decisions, awake hosts, do scheduled tasks (snapshots, migrations), use "big" graphics views and interact with them etc.