[Libvirt-cim] What is the current state of VM guest creation/modification, storage pools, and metrics in Libvirt-CIM?

[Dan Smith]

DM> I am still a little fuzzy on network booting a paravirt guest, but
DM> I believe the details will come out as we get a bit further.

I would imagine it would be done via some cheating in dom0, which
would fake the PXE client action, download the kernel and ramdisk as
specified and then launch the guest out of body (i.e. without a
bootloader).

DM> This is what I had come to understand.  As we get a little farther
DM> we will make some proposals and see how the rest of the community
DM> feels about them.  Basically, I see a need for some sort of
DM> marriage between Libvirt-CIM and possible the sblim data-gatherer.
DM> Libvirt-CIM may need to gather the guest data from the host, but
DM> feed it to the sblim data-gatherer for consumption.  This will
DM> take a bit more thought though.  Dan suggested something similar.

I'm not really familiar with either (a) the implementation of the data
gatherer or (b) the profiles and classes needed to support metrics for
a CIM client.

Regarding the former, I would hope that the modules in the data
gatherer can be loaded as dynamic plugins, which would mean that we
could implement and maintain a data gatherer plugin in the libvirt-cim
tree, and "marry" it to some of our other infrastructure.  We would
install it in the proper location on a system when libvirt-cim is
installed, and the data gatherer would start to expose those bits.

Regarding the latter, we could just implement the metrics ourselves as
regular providers and not be dependent on the data gatherer at all.
As always, I'd be hesitant to do something other than use a
pre-existing framework for something like that, so we'd need to come
up with a good justification for going this route.

DM> One more question.  Daniel Veillard mentioned someone may be
DM> working on VM cloning capability.  Do you know any details about
DM> it or who might be working on it?

I'm not sure what you mean exactly, which probably means my answer to
your question is "no" :)...  However, you should probably ask the
libvirt mailing list[1].

Thanks!

1: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list

-- 
Dan Smith
IBM Linux Technology Center
email: danms at us.ibm.com