[libvirt] [RFC PATCH] Add new migration flag VIR_MIGRATE_DRY_RUN

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 04:34:02PM -0600, Jim Fehlig wrote:
> A dry run can be used as a best-effort check that a migration command
> will succeed. The destination host will be checked to see if it can
> accommodate the resources required by the domain. DRY_RUN will fail if
> the destination host is not capable of running the domain. Although a
> subsequent migration will likely succeed, the success of DRY_RUN does not
> ensure a future migration will succeed. Resources on the destination host
> could become unavailable between a DRY_RUN and actual migration.

I'm not really convinced this is a particularly useful concept,
as it is only going to catch a very small number of the reasons
why migration can fail. So you still have to expect the real
migration invokation to have a strong chance of failing.


> 
> Signed-off-by: Jim Fehlig <jfehlig at suse.com>
> ---
> 
> If it is agreed this is useful, my thought was to use the begin and
> prepare phases of migration to implement it. qemuMigrationDstPrepareAny()
> already does a lot of the heavy lifting wrt checking the host can
> accommodate the domain. Some of it, and the remaining migration phases,
> can be short-circuited in the case of dry run.
> 
> One interesting wrinkle I've observed is the check for cpu compatibility.
> AFAICT qemu is actually invoked on the dst, "filtered-features" of the cpu
> are requested via qmp, and results are checked against cpu in domain config.
> If cpu on dst is insufficient, migration fails in the prepare phase with
> something like "guest CPU doesn't match specification: missing features: z y z".
> I was hoping to avoid launching qemu in the case of dry run, but that may
> be unavoidable if we'd like a dependable dry run result.

Even launching QEMU isn't good enough - it has to actually process the
migration data stream for devices to get a good indication of success,
at which point you're basically doing a real migration.


Regards,
Daniel
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