[et-mgmt-tools] RFC On importing raw images
Daniel P. Berrange
berrange at redhat.com
Thu Oct 9 19:55:59 UTC 2008
On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 12:23:13PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> Bryan Kearney wrote:
> > We are starting to look at more interesting use cases around bringing in
> > existing appliances into virt-manager. Joey has some interesting
> > questions about driver, but I wanted to bring up an easier one.
> >
> > Some of public appliances which exist are raw disk images which can
> > easily be booted, but have no virt-image xml file. The user can of
> > course manually create the file, but I think it would be nice to have
> > the tooling help this. I could see one of the following solutions. Can
> > folks pipe in with comments on these or another approach?
> >
>
> > (1) Create an "interactive" mode for virt-image which prompts the user.
>
> Interactive shouldn't be our first goal, if a goal at all. We
> should design for the command line options and build a cli
> wizard as an afterthought.
>
> > (2) Modify virt-image to allow for all data normally the xml to be
> > passed at command line (example, add a --imagefile parameter)
> > (3)Create a simple pre-processor to achieve 1 or 2 above.
> >
>
> Hmm, the whole problem of taking an existing disk image and
> turning into something useful is not handled well by any of
> the virt-* tools.
>
> There needs to be an explicit way using one of the tools to
> say 'Don't install anything on this, just build an xml file
> with these options'. In turn there could be a flag to dump
> out libvirt xml or virt-image xml.
>
> The main problem is, where do we do this?
It really isn't all that much different from the live cd case
where there's no installer either - in fact the live cd
installer class in virtinst can basically do 90% of the
neccessary stuff already - just doesn't need to bother with
adding a CDROM device.
> - virt-install: Seems the only option for libvirt xml, if
> we want to define and start the guest. But what about just
> dumping out the xml? Seems like it may be getting a bit
> too ambitious. There are lots of virt-install options that
> don't map well to virt-image, though we could just build
> the xml and feed it through a libvirt xml -> virt-image
> parser in virt-convert.
How about just adding a '--preinstalled' flag, handled in the
same way as --livecd, just causing it to skip install phase
and boot it straight off.
This could work in virt-manager too - in the wizard step where
you select install source. You currently chose network install
source, PXE, or local media. Simply add a fourth 'pre-installed'.
All the rest of the wizard steps still apply, so we'd want to
share all that.
> - virt-image: no go for libvirt xml, but could be expanded
> to build image xml, and probably the most consistent place
> to do it.
Yeah, I don't think its applicable for virt-image. virt-image
is really focused on having all the domain metadata upfront
and not prompting the user for it.
Daniel
--
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|
More information about the et-mgmt-tools
mailing list