[libvirt] Proposal: A place to store metadata about guests

I think we need a place to store general metadata about guests. Here are some uses: - Store data about available installer ISOs, guests which are archived and not known to libvirt. - Replace the guest inspection thread in virt-manager. virt-manager would just collect the data from the store. The inspection data would be generated by another process. - Expand on <description/> field in the libvirt XML, and satisfy various requests we've had for a place to store metadata and extend libvirt XML. - Store data on behalf of applications, esp. virt-manager. I'm not envisaging a database or daemon for this. Just a simple directory per host containing flat files. Perhaps we can add some tools or a library to make creation/querying of these files easy. It would be nice if the database was made available over the network (Avahi?). You could also use this database to answer questions like: - "Do I have a Debian wheezy 32 bit guest anywhere on my network?" - "Does any guest have libpng <= <vulnerable-version> installed?" - "Bring up a Fedora 14 instance" (the tools would have to locate a suitable install ISO and put together the correct virt-install command line) There is some crossover with VDSM and even RHEV-M here. Thoughts? Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org