Re: [libvirt] RFE: virsh list improvement (--description and --details)

On Mon, 2017-05-08 at 09:16 +0200, Przemysław Sztoch wrote: > Dear Michal and Pavel, > > We cover about 100 clients who have their own and simple CentOS KVM > installations. > Their technical skills are far from writing python scripts. They expect > simple solutions. They don't necessarily have to write the Python script themselves, though :) > Talking to our helpdesk, I found that 70% of libvirt and virtualization > problems are: > A) lack of autostart activation on critical guests; then occasional > failures and reboots affect lack of automatic startup of key services, > B) frequent overcommiting of allocated virtual processors and memory due > to the lack of basic planning and addition operations of local admin > stuff :-(, > C) misconfiguration of qemu-agent, which affects many problems with safe > restart, snapshot, backup, etc. (the "Time" column is a perfect > diagnostic here) > D) leaving unnecessary snapshots that lie unused after many months, > E) live migration attempts that fail to put domain in a transient mode > leave the guests disappearing in unexplained circumstances after kvm > host restart :-) > > Virtually all the above problems of everyday life, our helpdesk is now > able to diagnose by command: > virsh list --details --managed-save > By the way, they can easily update the documentation with one compact list. > > I do not understand your dislike for the proposed changes. All the > members of our team and teams of our partners have been very > enthusiastic about the new functionality. > You govern, so you have to decide. ;-) The problem with your proposal is that it doesn't fit neatly in a generic tool like virsh. My suggestion would be to implement the script yourself, then ship it to your clients and instruct them to run # virt-diagnostics.py or whatever you end up calling it to obtain the information you care about. Doing so will allow you to have plenty of freedom when it comes to tailoring the output for your specific needs instead of having to keep the tool generic, which you would have to do if you wanted it to be shipped with libvirt, and it won't be any harder for your clients to run it. -- Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization