Re: [libvirt] VMware ESX driver announcement
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:52:04PM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
Hello,
I'm participate in a project of the Paderborn Center for Parallel
Computing, an institute of the University of Paderborn:
http://pc2.uni-paderborn.de
The project's goal is to use virtualization in a supercomputer
environment. We've decided to use libvirt to manage different
hypervisor. A subgoal is to extend the driver base of libvirt. We've
started an VMware ESX driver and are investigating Hyper-V support
(see next mail).
This is great news - VMWare support is one of our top wish-list
items !
The ESX driver isn't complete yet, currently it supports:
- domain lookup by ID, UUID and name
- domain listing
- domain suspend and resume
- domain reboot, if the VMware tools are installed inside the domain
- domain start and shutdown
- domain migration
As DV mentions, if we can get support for 'dumpxml' API on a guest
then that would be sufficient to make it worth including this new
driver.
The driver uses the SOAP based VMware VI API. We've tried to
generate
SOAP client code with gSOAP and looked at other SOAP libraries, but
the VI API uses inheritance in a way that gSOAP fails to generate C
code for. Because of this we wrote a minimal SOAP client based on
libcurl and libxml2 that can handle this inheritance problem in C.
This sounds like a good idea. I had a look at code auto-generated from
the WSDL definition for ESX and it was pretty horrific, and enourmous
code. Writing a minimal client for the APIs you need to use looks
like a reasonable approach to me - a little more work but nicer code.
The next item on the todo list is domain creation, because currently
the driver can only deal with prior existing domains.
I'd suggest doing a 'virDomainDumpXML' API first, because with that
plus the APIs you have already done, you'd have a good enough API
coverage for day-to-day read-only monitoring / query tasks. Of
course if you do domain creation, I won't complain either :-)
Not had time to review the actual code yet - will get back to you with
feedback on the code itself later...
Regards,
Daniel
--
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|