[Libvir] Storage manager initial requirements and thoughts

Hi all. At the Red Hat virtualization team meeting last week we spent some time talking about the problem of remote storage management, which is a requirement for at the very least creating remote guests. Remote storage management also delivers a lot of benefits for managing guest storage, provisioning, and a host of other issues. Note that we don't (I think) believe that storage management should be part of libvirt. However we might want to be able to grab storage information with libvirt when creating a guest, for example. Here's the tentative requirements we came up with, along with several questions that came up. We have two important use cases for remote storage management: --Create a new guest against an existing physical device --Create a new guest against a file on an existing physical device (SELinux context must match up on both) Requirements: 2 key requirements: enumerate devices, create files * Enumerate devices (unallocated disks) * storage pool * Unallocated space * Allocated volumes -- free -- in use * Read only / Read-write * Host availability * Volume -- Global unique name -- Local device name -- Usage -- Mounted locally -- Assigned to guest read only shared exclusive -- Inactive guest * Create a backing store for a guest * need to know what storage is available * Can be plain file * Can be a physical partition (local scsi/IDE, SAN) * Can be a logical volume * Can be network - iscsi/nbd Cases: Physical device --> create partitions Volume group --> create logical volumes Directory --> create files Todos: Investigate gparted, one of the partition management tools we already have (apis? remote accessibility?) (I believe Jim Meyering volunteered to take a look at this?) Identify what other scenarios we need to address. Please comment; I'm hoping we can get these into a more definite form sooner rather than later. -- Red Hat Virtualization Group http://redhat.com/virtualization Hugh Brock | virt-manager http://virt-manager.org hbrock(a)redhat.com | virtualization library http://libvirt.org