[libvirt] Ephemeral VM operation
A number of hypervisors have a mode in which changes made to storage are not persisted across a reboot of the VM. qemu uses the -snapshot flag; VMware refers to this functionality as non-persistent disk[1]. Is this functionality something that is interesting to libvirt? Dave [1] http://www.virtuesofvirtualization.com/2006/10/magic-of-nonpersistent-drives...
On 10/08/2010 09:49 AM, Dave Allan wrote:
A number of hypervisors have a mode in which changes made to storage are not persisted across a reboot of the VM. qemu uses the -snapshot flag; VMware refers to this functionality as non-persistent disk[1]. Is this functionality something that is interesting to libvirt?
Dave
[1] http://www.virtuesofvirtualization.com/2006/10/magic-of-nonpersistent-drives...
From the point of view of "giving options to end users" then it probably should be. To implement in QEMU/KVM, it sounds like it could be done by using a snapshot(s), plus nuking the snapshot when the vm is shut down?
On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 06:49:05PM -0400, Dave Allan wrote:
A number of hypervisors have a mode in which changes made to storage are not persisted across a reboot of the VM. qemu uses the -snapshot flag; VMware refers to this functionality as non-persistent disk[1]. Is this functionality something that is interesting to libvirt?
yes I think this is an important use case, it allows for example a rather trivial and safe implementation of things like open kiosk you may find in public places (or implement a scratch environment allowing the kids to play without much risk for a more personal/private use :-) !) Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ daniel@veillard.com | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/
On Fri, 8 Oct 2010, Daniel Veillard wrote:
On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 06:49:05PM -0400, Dave Allan wrote:
A number of hypervisors have a mode in which changes made to storage are not persisted across a reboot of the VM. qemu uses the -snapshot flag; VMware refers to this functionality as non-persistent disk[1]. Is this functionality something that is interesting to libvirt?
yes I think this is an important use case, it allows for example a rather trivial and safe implementation of things like open kiosk you may find in public places (or implement a scratch environment allowing the kids to play without much risk for a more personal/private use :-) !)
but is this the 'right' place to be doing this? It adds complexity Wouldn't it be simpler simply to make a working copy of a gold image in known state and start the copy? -- We follow that approach here -- Russ herrold
participants (4)
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Daniel Veillard -
Dave Allan -
Justin Clift -
R P Herrold