Re: [libvirt] [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a single project
On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 11:27:46PM +0100, Antoine Martin wrote:
Hi,
I am moving this thread here as this seems more appropriate.
Sorry it has taken so long..
Here are 2 things that really get in the way of moving my existing
installations to libvirt:
* I tend to store much meta data with each VM instance: it can be things
like ownership (contact details as text), monitoring info (sms phone
numbers), backup (list of paths), firewall rules (custom syntax, with
failover rules, etc), etc.
At the moment, these extra bits of information consist of just a few
optional lines of shell in each VM's definition file. I can extend these
whenever I need, enumerate the VMs using the standard mechanism and
trigger my specific actions as needed (firewall rules, backup or whatever).
I see no way of doing this with libvirt. But please correct me if I am
wrong.
We fairly recently added a free-form text
<description>...</description>
element in the domain XML that you can stuff whatever you like into.
The 0.8.0 release will also have support for explicitly managing firewall
rules associated with a VM. It is fairly flexible, so there's a good
chance that it would cope with at least some of your needs there.
* not everything is exposed via libvirt:
virsh can retrieve vncdisplay
but libvirt (or at least the python bindings) does not. How come?
This happens to be one thing I need for writing a libvirt backend for my
virtual desktop software.
The 'virsh vncdisplay' command is simply fetching the XML doc for the
guest and then extracting the VNC port using a xpath expression
/domain/devices/graphics[@type='vnc']/@port
So for python you'd want to just get an XML handling module and do similar.
Regards,
Daniel
--
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|