Re: [Libvir] RFC: A more convenient 'virsh create' command

The current implementation of 'virsh create' takes an XML file as its only parameter & creates a domain from this. This is great if you have a suitable XML file already, but if you are just trying to automate some simple tasks from the shell then the need to use XML is a little cumbersome. Thus I was thinking perhaps we could have an alternate way to define a new VM (keep the current XML based way too of course) QEMU for example makes it very easy to launch a new VM: qemu -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso Taking inspiration from this syntax we could allow: virsh start -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso -name Foo Internally, the 'start' command would simply transform these command line args into the neccessary libvirt XML and then call the normal create functions. Another way would be have a 'genxml' command, which accepted these list of devices / config properties & then printed out appropriate XMl. This could be piped to the regular 'virsh create' command virsh genxml -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso \ -name Foo | virsh create -

This isn't so critical for Xen, because people are already used to writing config files before creating the domain, but when we get a QEMU backend i think such a convenient method for defining new VMs will be neccessary to encourage users to use virsh instead of manually calling 'qemu'. Even for Xen users it would make shell script easier though :-)