Re: [libvirt-users] qemu:///session and network-mounted home directories

Cole Robinson <crobinso(a)redhat.com&gt; writes: Hmm, but what do you mean by shared VMs here? Just shared disk images, or also shared configuration, or also marked autostart on multiple hosts? It seems like there are two closely related problems here: 1. For some shared VM and host, should we start that VM on that host? 2. Preventing VMs from running on multiple hosts at the same time Problem 2 is definitely solved pretty well by libvirt's locking support; even if that locking doesn't currently work properly with qemu:///session, I accept the idea that the correct answer is to get that working. And problem 1 is solved as a side effect of solving problem 2, because now one can just mark the VMs autostart on all hosts and let them race to get a lock on the disk image, arbitrarily distributing them over the hosts. But surely there is a better way to solve problem 1 than that! I suppose one could punt that question to a cross-host VM scheduler like OpenStack. In that case I guess what one might do is not mark anything autostart, and have the external scheduler come in on bootup and kick specific things into action. Then you would rely on the cross-host scheduler knowing what should run where. But that doesn't really scale elegantly between the one-host and multi-host cases, since in the one-host case it would be somewhat awkward and unnecessary to use a multi-host scheduler. Hmm, I suppose if the external scheduler instead specified a mapping from /etc/machine-id to a list of autostarted VMs, that mapping could be shared on all hosts, and so would work for both cases rather nicely. Alternatively, even better: the autostart mechanism could be made generic, allowing multiple ways to get the list of VMs that should be autostarted. Then the most simple way (certainly not the best way) to get the desired functionality would be to write a script that returns a list of VMs that should be running on the current host. Does that seem like a plausible approach? (This would definitely work well with my future plan to write a simple, minimal multi-host scheduler that can work with qemu:///session...) Hmm, well, I was going to say that that was just a throwaway idea, but I've actually convinced myself that it might be a good idea now. Since it has some pretty good applicability to actual qemu:///system stuff. Yeah, I could definitely do some local hack to get things working nicely, but local hacks are what I am trying to avoid...