Sebastien, You nailed it. What you described are the most common issues that people face when deploying CS. 1) Proposition - we need to add a "help" or "question mark sign" across our terms - that will launch a small pop-up and educate an end users and provide a link or point of reference to the web for more info. 2) If we can have the help pages distributed with CS in HTML format - that will certain simplify and help the new on-boarder with learning new concepts. - "Advanced Network Setup" wizard - at least for the VmWare portion - I've had several issues where I had to fall back to API calls to complete what GUI could not. I think I should do a video on that to explain the concept a little better and do a walkthrough - as well as file bug reports for the GUI issues. - DHCP/DNS is another issue we need to address especially for the environments that use their own DHCP and DNS servers (corporate). I recall we had this discussed before on users ML - we should probably document this better. Regards ilya -----Original Message----- From: Sebastien Goasguen [mailto:runseb@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 4:06 PM To: cloudstack-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] "Arming" cloudstack supporters in "stack war" bakeoffs.... On Jan 23, 2013, at 7:53 PM, Alex Huang wrote: > Hi All, > > I like to discuss with the community how we can best "arm" cloudstack supporters in "stack war" bakeoffs. This is due to Ilya's email thread. I think his question and others like it will be repeated often. The community suggested an objective process to evaluate the various stacks: bakeoffs, which I'm supportive of. But it make sense that people don't just enter into these bake-offs blind. We should provide them with the information, experience and process to properly conduct cloudstack in these bakeoffs. However, I'm not sure what's the right combination to provide. So I like to start this topic to see what the community thinks. > > I asked this during cloudstack-meeting and Chip suggested Dave's runbook. That's a good starting point. Is there any other suggestions? > Alex, I believe the runbook was not updated after the 4.0 release, so it needs patching. I also think it describes an advanced zone. >From my recent experience folks who try CloudStack struggle with: -Basic vs. Advanced. Some folks dive straight into advanced and hit the wall on vlans. -Network connectivity of the systemVMs. This is still not clearly explained. We need better diagrams, and clear explanation. Maybe a good blog on this would work wonders. -If you have existing DHCP,DNS services how do you deploy cloudstack with it. This is a typical case at universities, where students don't have access to the network. They just have couple boxes with static IPs and no VLANS. -Documentation issues. Some folks on Ubtuntu have been hit with https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-460 which is patched in master, but not reflected in the deb on the repo. We need to check our processes to update blockers like these faster. -Finally, DevCloud. It's a great tool, but has limitations (ttylinux) and like Mike is facing now, if you have not followed the threads on devcloud over the last 6 months, you may not have a clear picture of how to use it. -sebastien > There's a top level section in our wiki that makes sense for this. After we come up with the right combination, we can update the wiki and continue to update the wiki with more information. > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Newbie > > Thanks. > > --Alex >