[et-mgmt-tools] Idea/help with virt-clone?

[Michael DeHaan]

Bryan Kearney wrote:
>
>>
>> Actually the nature of the virt-image format is that you shouldn't
>> need to do any xml surgery, it is (ideally) completely portable. 
>> Specific
>> things like memory amounts and mac addresses are specified at the time
>> virt-image is called: see virt-image --help for all the goodies that
>> can be specified.
>> tools
> But ideally, the initial virt image xml would contain the memory and 
> cpu settings from the source system.. since that is as close to a 
> template as we have.
>
> -- bk

Yes, we'd want that if it's not already there.

In the cobbler use case, I can see defaulting --virt-ram (in cobbler) to 
"", which would mean, "use what is in the file", but more often than not 
someone is going to want to tweak it up or down.

For instance:

cobbler image copy --name=image --newname=image-with-more-ram 
--virt-ram=1024

This makes an image object like image-with-more-ram (keeping the behind 
the scenes XML the same), but when invoked with koan, grants more RAM to 
the system than was originally requested.

This is basically how all the overrides in cobbler work today and makes 
things easy to edit in the web app.

Currently non-image based guests default to a ram value in 
/etc/cobbler/settings when they are created without specificing a limit.

Anyhow, as long as we have all the flags on --virt-image so we don't 
have to override the XML, and make it very easy to /get/ that XML, I'm 
happy and can start working on this shortly ... we can just wait for the 
tools to prepare that to come along and add them to the docs/process later.

--Michael