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@gmail.com