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@gmail.com> 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.

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

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