[libvirt] esx driver: XML format for guest OS type/variant

[Matthias Bolte]

2011/1/11 Jake Xu <jake at demonwaremail.net>:
> Hi,
> I am trying to create a VM using the Python bindings of Libvirt. I can
> successfully create VM from a XML template, but I can't find any way to
> define the guest OS type/variant like CentOS 5.5 64bit for my VM. The native
> format converted from XML is always guestOS="other-64" - which doesn't tell
> us much about the guest operating system.
> I have looked at the C libvirt source code a bit, and it seems like libvirt
> does not support defining guest os type using XML description yet.

That's correct, currently there is no way to pass guest OS
type/variant information to the ESX driver, as the domain XML config
doesn't include such information.

> Is there any way I can set the guest OS type for my VM?

Unfortunately you can only select between 32 and 64bit guests at the
moment. But that should work for most guest OS types anyway.

On the other hand it might be important for some guest OS types might
to be set correctly because ESX might enable special optimizations or
workarounds for them.

This sits is on my todo list since a while now, but I didn't figure
out a proper solution yet. One option would be to add an guest OS
type/variant element to the domain XML config, but that would only be
useful for the ESX and the VirtualBox driver. Another option would be
to add an esx (or actually vmware) namespace extension to the domain
XML config as we currently have for arbitrary qemu commandline
arguments.

Matthias