[libvirt] Proposing Archive / Unarchive VM Guest functionality.

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 06:39:34PM +0530, Suhas Mane wrote:
> Hello Team,
> 
> Me and few of my friends are planning to add VM Guest archival
> functionality.
> What we are proposing is:
> 1.  Below diagram shows: possible states of VM guest (*archived new state
> introduced*)
> 2.  For any reason, User / Admin expects to archive the VM guest to remote
> storage space, so that storage space consumed by VM guest (disk image...
> .vmdk / .img etc..) will be relived. Rest configuration files will be
> intact.
> 3.  Later on when so called archived VM guest is to be booted, libvirt
> should unarchive the VM guest to local place, and booting should proceed as
> usual.

I'm not really convinced this is something we need / should do in
libvirt itself. When we talking about archiving VMs, I think that
in many cases apps are going to want to archive to some kind of
low cost cloud storage. If we do this archiving capability in libvrt,
then libvirt is going to have to learn about 1000's of differnet
cloud storage APIs.  As such, I think this concept is better done in
applications above libvirt, such as oVirt or OpenStack, where it can
be more easily integrated into their own storage architectures.

Daniel
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