On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 11:46:17AM -0400, Anderson Kaiser wrote:

Greetings all,

I am looking for a solution to use IPMI (BMC) in with LibVirt (Virt-Manager). Actually there is a Customer behind this request as well.

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).

Trying to be short: We are looking for a Solution in OpenStack Environment. Customer wants to have the entire environment running in Virt-Manager (probably for a P.O.C or tests purposes). So here is what he is trying to do: http://red.ht/1HfNn9r

So you want to have a virt-manager that sees bunch of machines and VMs on them and these VMs are running OpenStack, right?

This template you can find in the Red Hat's OpenStack Install Guide. So far so good. But OpenStack works with High Availability and in some moment of the procedure you have to create an IPMI (BMC) interface in order to Fence the HA Nodes and Controllers.

(Just for curiosity in this first moment customer is setting the Nodes - Hypervisors - as Nested KVM - so he can use the VM as an Hypervisor as well).

That said the 3 VMs which are the controller, and also the 2 nodes, should have an IPMI Interface. Is it possible to have it in KVM? I mean, seems that in SeaBIOS we already have this support: http://www.seabios.org/pipermail/seabios/2012-August/004405.html

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.

Also I found a Red Hat BugZilla regarding this request: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=815136 . but it seems to be "abandoned" since the beginning.

Well, it's just that nobody saw the potential in it or nobody had the time to do so. Or nobody really wanted it.

So the point is:

- Is it possible to have a NIC or a Device emulating an IPMI (BMC) - interface? If yes, how can we export it to the VM?

Maybe we can do a pass-trough if the hardware is available. But Lets think in a Notebook or a Desktop, for instance (we are working with a POC, remember?) and maybe the IPMI Interface could not be available or oesn't exist.

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 thought if it was possible to have some kind of IPMI NIC emulated and also an "brdge" and then an additional virtual network for this bridge. Am I going to far? ;-)

I there's a device that behaves like a NIC then it can be plugged into a network ;)

Anderson Kaiser (RHCE, RHCVA) Team Lead - Red Hat Global Support Services Latin America Red Hat Inc,. akaiser@redhat.com Ph: +55 11 3529-6000 Red Hat Support: 0800-602-5222

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