Cockpit 159

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 159.

Configure data deduplication with VDO devices

The “Virtual Data Optimizer” is a new feature to eliminate duplication and add compression to block devices. This is mostly aimed at providing storage for virtual machines or object storage systems like Ceph.

This is being developed upstream by the dm-vdo GitHub project. It is currently available in RHEL 7.5 alpha and expected to land in other distributions eventually.

Cockpit’s Storage page can now create and configure VDO devices. See it in action:

Add serial console to virtual Machines page and redesign the Consoles tab

The Machines page has offered in-browser and external VNC console access to virtual machines for some time. However, this does not work on “headless” virtual machines that don’t provide a (virtual) graphics card and VNC libvirt device. The Consoles tab now offers a serial console for these kind of VMs to be able to administer them from Cockpit as well.

This went along with a redesign of the Consoles tab to better fit the various types of consoles.

See it in action:

Thanks to Marek Libra for this feature!

Show more error message details for VM failures on virtual Machines page

Errors from virtual machine operations on the Storage page can now be expanded to show more details:

VM error expander

Thanks to Marek Libra for this improvement!

Try it out

Cockpit 159 is available now: