On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 09:13:42PM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote:
Regarding the current features of the ESX driver. You can define,
undefine, start, stop, reboot, suspend, resume and migrate virtual
machines. You can also reconfigure virtual CPUs and memory, but you
can't snapshot a virtual machine yet, because libvirt doesn't have an
API for snapshots yet. It exposes the Xen save/restore API, but that
doesn't map onto the snapshot mechanics of ESX.
Well, if you have suggestions about what this Snapshotting API could
look like, I'm interested. It's basically the main block I still see
missing before something like libvirt-1.0 (though I'm sure a number of
others will show up in the meantime :-)
My main problem is how to make a reliable API. In a VMWare environemnt
it sounds a bit simpler because the hypervisor offers this as a core
feature. But for other hypervisors where libvirt would held the
responsability of making sure all stoarages of the domain can be
snapshotted, actually implementing the snapshots, and making sure the
whole operation suceeded, is really complex.
Maybe we will need multiple APIs, as migration has shown we sometime
need to provide different kind of APIs for the same operation based on
different client needs. That doesn't concern me too much, but making
sure that if a snapshotting API is available, then it's reliable is
my main concern.
Daniel
--
Daniel Veillard | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit
http://xmlsoft.org/
daniel(a)veillard.com | Rpmfind RPM search engine
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http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library
http://libvirt.org/