[libvirt] Migrate not running guests

Juan Quintela quintela at redhat.com
Mon Jul 5 18:37:33 UTC 2010


Hi

In an exercise to use more libvirt, I am trying to use libvirt with my
normal use.  First, I will explain how I normally run my guests.

I install guests on a machine with virt-install <....>
I store all my guests images in a shared directory that is mounted in
all my hosts.

Now, it is trivial for me to launch qemu-kvm <options> on any machine,
it don't matters if I have to use a rhel5, rhel6, fedora13 host.
Everything works as expected.

Except for the little fact that I have to remember the whole command
line when I go from one machine to other, to use ide/virtio/rtl8139/....
You get the idea.  And thing got worse the more guests that I have.

Now I can run virt-manager on my desktop (machine A).
Connect to host B.  And launch my guests VM1 (on host B).  No problem so far.
I can indeed migrate my guests to machine C.  No problem so far.

And now I can start my guest VM1 in both host B and host C.  It is there
on virt-manager, one click away of launching.

The functionality that I would really like is a "way" to store my guest
information on my desktop (machine A), and be able to launch the guest
on any host.  I.e. a menu option when I click on the guest, that let me
launch it in a different host, not in the one that it is defined.

If that is difficult to implement for now, a "migrate" for a shut off
guest will do by now.  It should be something like 
      virsh dumpxml foo > foo.xml
      virsh define foo.xml

(this is the way that I do it by hand now).

Why do I need this?  because I have hosts with RHEL5/RHEL6/F13/....

And just now, I have to reinstall, do the previous dumpxml/define each
time that I have to reproduce one bug in one host or another.  To make
things worse, sometimes RHEL5.4 and RHEL6.0 xml's are not completely
compatible and I have to fix it by hand.

Any better ideas about how to do this?

Notice that I think that RHEV-M does something like this, but debugging
on a RHEV-M host is an exercise on pain (everything is read only, ...)

Later, Juan.




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