On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 09:50:52AM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote:
Actually, for the ESX/VMware and VirtualBox driver I don't really care about detailed OS inspection, I think. The initial point was that some hypervisors allow to specify OS type and distro in order to enable OS dependent stuff like optimizations and workarounds. But libvirt currently doesn't allow you to specify this in the XML config in order to pass this information to the driver.
FYI, here's a (probably incomplete) list of guest OS types used by VMware: http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-guestos.html
libvirt goes about this in a different way: it expects the higher level management tool to choose the right devices for the new guest (which is essentially what virt-manager / virt-install do when you give them the OS hint). It's probably impossible from the ESX driver itself, but you could run virt-inspector on the domain and translate the result into a suitable guestOS string. virt-inspector supports a large proportion of the OSes listed. I agree with what you said earlier: this either needs to be modelled explicitly in libvirt, or else you can add an esx:-specific XML namespace to carry this extra data. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v