[libvirt] the role of libvirtd

Hugh O. Brock hbrock at redhat.com
Wed Jul 8 16:10:18 UTC 2009


Hello all.

I spent quite a while yesterday in a meeting with a client interested in
using libvirt for a large project.

They are quite happy in general with the direction things are
going. However they have objections to a couple of libvirt design points
that have come up in multiple cases in the past, including in developing
the other project I'm involved in, oVirt. Specifically, they would
really prefer that libvirtd be a one-stop shop for everything they need
to do on a virtualization host, including things we have traditionally
held out-of-scope for libvirt. A partial list of those things would
include:

* In-depth multipath config management
* Hardware lifecycle management (power-off, reboot, etc.)
* HA configuration

... and pretty much anything else you might want to do on a piece of
hardware that is hosting virtual machines.

My initial reaction of course was to tell them "Well you should just
use a separate agent for that sort of thing." But of course this means
making a separate connection to the node depending on what operation
you want to perform, which is cumbersome.

So I guess what I'm asking is, why *not* expand the scope of libvirtd
to be a one-stop shop for managing a node? Is there a really good
reason it shouldn't have the remaining capabilities libvirt users
want? Is that reason good enough to balance the headache our users
have to deal with in coming up with a separate package to handle the
tasks libvirtd does not?

Slings, arrows, or thunderous applause welcome...

Take care,
--Hugh




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