10:18 a.m.
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.
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
Using virtual machines
Using Python to access VMs
A sample problem
Problem statement
Solution requirements
Using VMs to solve the problem
New problems introduced by using VMs
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
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
Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS
openSuse, SuSE
Ubuntu, Debian, Mint
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
8:01 p.m.
On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 08:18:38PM -0500, David Ashley wrote:
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.
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.
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.
You could mention the possibility of keeping some data in the XML
itself, as there is a <metadata/> element just for that.
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? :)
8:53 p.m.
Hi David,
this seems so great! Almost everyday I see people struggling with KVM -
including myself. Specially for newcommers it isn't very clear what steps
you have to take to deploy your VMs and be able to connect and manage them.
I like your table of contents, I believe these things need to be covered in
detail:
-Examples of how to deploy servers (from an .iso file, but also from
existing VMs) with an ssh key
-Post install steps, or how to run a script after a server gets deployed
-Access through VNC from remotely, because in most cases I believe the KVM
server won't have a GUI (in order to use virt-manager) and the admin would
be remotely. My personal experience with remote VNC through ssh X11
forwarding of virt-viewer and virt-manager is that they need a very fast
connection otherwise they easily hung.
Looking forward to see the guide!
Markos
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 4:18 AM, David Ashley <w.david.ashley(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
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days inactive
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2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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David Ashley -
Markos Gogoulos -
Martin Kletzander