On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 08:18:38PM -0500, David Ashley wrote:
All -
Let me introduce myself. I am W. David Ashley, the primary author of
the "Libvirt Application Development Guide Using Python" which will
soon be published on the
libvirt.org web site. I hope all of you will
enjoy the new guide when it becomes available.
I have multiple decades of experience in writing documentation and
training guides and I have about eight years of experience using
libvirt and qemu/kvm virtual machines. Most of that experience was in
creating and maintaining VM on-demand systems.
Hi, that's awesome! I had just a quick look at the outline and
added some comments in-line, but haven't though about anything major
to mention or describe (like a new chapter) as it always takes me a
huge amount of time to come up with such ideas.
In the meantime, I am planning a new guide and I would appreciate
some
feedback from the libvirt user community concerning the potential
usefulness and contents of the new guide. The proposed title of the
guide will be "Automating Virtual Machines". The current (very) rough
outline is:
Introduction
Intro to virtual machines
Installing virtual machines
I don't know if you are planning to do that, but in case you don't
want to spend considerable amount of time explaining the XML and
setting up everything from scratch, it would be better to drop a hint
about virt-install and such.
Using virtual machines
Using Python to access VMs
I was wondering what kind of access are you planning to talk about in
this chapter, mainly since "How to programmatically access VMs" is the
third chapter and there is an intro to python's libvirt module.
A sample problem
Problem statement
Solution requirements
Using VMs to solve the problem
New problems introduced by using VMs
This is very good thing to mention that people often forget to think
about in cases when they already decided to move to VMs for example.
How to programmatically access VMs
Intro to the python libvirt module
How to connect to a VM
How to access and control a guest domain
Information the python libvirt module can not provide
Storing information about VMs
Deciding what information should be stored
Using simple text files
Using a simple database
You could mention the possibility of keeping some data in the XML
itself, as there is a <metadata/> element just for that.
Securing your information
How to set up a VM on demand environment
Discovering a VMs ip address
Using cron to start processes
Starting up a VM
Invoking a program on the VM
Using SSH to access a VM
Shutting down a VM
Alternatives to starting/stopping a VM
Using the libvirt guest agent
Installing the libvirt guest agent
libvirt itself doesn't have any guest agent. But libvirt can utilize
QEMU's guest agent and you probably meant that. There's also spice's
guest agent called spice-vdagent that libvirt can setup, but does not
utilize in any way.
Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS
openSuse, SuSE
Ubuntu, Debian, Mint
Are these that different or is it just the matter of s/yum/yast/ or
s/yum/apt-get/ and similar? :)
Using (querying) the libvirt guest agent
Logging VM activities
Host activities
VM activities
Securing your VMs
Host security
VM security
Any feedback/suggestions you have will be appreciated and I assure you
they will be given serious consideration. At this point, nothing has
been written except this rough outline so this is your chance to help
form the contents or even make suggestions for a completely different
guide.
Feel free to post back to this list or send me private email.
W. David Ashley
w.david.ashley(a)gmail.com
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