Column for Description (or other Custom Value) in Sunstone VMs table

Hello,

I deployed almost 30 VMs in my test enviroment (5.4) and was looking for a possibility to add a description to each VM. By adding an Attribute DESCRIPTION I can achieve this. What is missing is that I can use this field in the table view.
I didn’t find an option in the yaml file for this.

Question:
Is it possible to add a DESCRIPTION column to the VMs table view? If yes, how?

Background is that I can see my future customers using this platform (all coming from VMware vCenter) complaining about this missing functionalty.

Thanks for
Uli

P.S.:

  1. I know there are labels, but that’s not same.
  2. “Misusing” the Name is also no option, because I use this field for contextualizazion

Hi @uli,

I think adding the field description is not a good idea. For example, if the field has 4 paragraphs, the datatable will be decompensated and will not be friendly to the user.

It may be better to place the mouse in a VM and display the DESCRIPTION field (if it exists) as a tooltip. So it would not overload the view.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Abel.

Hi Abel,

thanks for picking up this topic!
I also see a problem the DESCRIPTION field ruining the tableview when too long. But I also do not see using tooltips on hundreds of servers to be very handy.

I would like to have a quick overview with all servers at one glance.

Two possible solutions for the tableview come to my mind:

  1. Limit the length of the description input to e.g. 25 characters
  2. Truncate the description filed in the tableview to 25 characters to not ruin the tableview.

Best Regards
Uli

Solution 2 is the smartest in my opinion.

The team and me will consider the options.

Thanks for your help @uli.

Regards.
Abel.

Great. Looking forward to hear from your decision.

Hello Abel,

kindly asking if you already got into discussing this. I am asking because I am pretty far with my OpenNebula evaluation in our enterprise and the more I use sunstone (with rapidlygrowing numbers of VMs) the more I miss this functionality.
I also started evaluating the user cloud view and I think it would be really beneficial for the end users to the the description value in the VM overview as well.

Thanks
Uli