Re: [libvirt-users] IPMI in Libvirt

On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 11:46:17AM -0400, Anderson Kaiser wrote: If the customer you are talking about is a Red Hat customer, and they want to build this on RHEL, then the solution might be found by the ways of support and I believe there might be better ways to push this through there (just in case nobody on this public mailing-list is interested in following the same idea and collaborating on it). So you want to have a virt-manager that sees bunch of machines and VMs on them and these VMs are running OpenStack, right? One question is whether this is in seabios, another one is whether it's supported in qemu? Maybe there is no need to add anything and it can be already used or maybe we need to add something, I don't know. From what I know there is no support in libvirt for adding such interface to qemu VM. Even though it would be cool, I can't imagine what you should be able to do with it that you cannot do with libvirt. Apart from plugging it into running IPMI infrastructure. Apart from implementing this throughout the whole stack (bios, qemu, libvirt, etc.) I see few other ways out of this, depending on the use-case. If there's supposed to be unified infrastructure for maintaining machines, then you can use OpenStack an an abstraction layer by itself as it can manage both VMs and bare metal machines. If you just want to plug VMs into current IPMI infrastructure, you might be also better off creating new standalone "translator" program that converts IMPI commands to libvirt calls and vice versa. There are bunch of possible ways to tackle this, but it's hard to compare them without knowing the use-case. Anyway, I'm not saying adding the support to qemu and libvirt is not an option. If there is something usable in qemu we should add it to libvirt as well. Well, it's just that nobody saw the potential in it or nobody had the time to do so. Or nobody really wanted it. I don't think it's supposed to be seen as a normal device in the system (or is it? I don't have such experience with it), so pass-through wouldn't be an option. I also wouldn't make sense, I guess, since you want this to be available even when the machine is not working and passing this through would effectively disable it for the host which you shouldn't be able to do in order for it to do the trick. I there's a device that behaves like a NIC then it can be plugged into a network ;)