[Linux-cluster] Re: [Libvir] Storage manager initial requirements and thoughts

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 04:39:03PM -0500, Lon Hohberger wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 16:18 -0500, Hugh Brock wrote:
> 
> > Todos:
> >    Investigate gparted, one of the partition management tools we already 
> > have (apis? remote accessibility?) (I believe Jim Meyering volunteered 
> 
> * Investigate Conga's cluster and non-cluster remotely-accessible LVM
> management, which sounds like it would fit the bill?
> 
> APIs are all XMLRPC, IIRC, so they're extensible and flexible.

There unfortunately is a bit of an impedance mis-match between libvirt and
Conga. libvirt is a low level library written with the goal that if you
have a host running Xen / QEMU / KVM, you can just drop in the libvirt
library and get a set of APIs for managing the system. Experiance with
developing virt-inst, virt-manager & cobbler/koan has shown that we need
a simple API for enumerating available storage volumes, and allocating
new volumes. 

In providing such an API though, we don't want to have to mandate that 
everyone using libvirt also install Conga. While Conga is indeed a very
capable tool, requiring install / setup of another web service is going
to put up a singificant barrier to entry for people wanting to use libvirt/
Particularly for developers who are just experimenting with virtualization
on a laptop / desktop / couple of machines.

Hence our initial goal is to find a suitable C library we can call into
to perform our simple set of storage management tasks. Now in keeping 
with the libvirt model of pluggable hypervisor drivers, I'd  expect the 
underlying libvirt impl of any storage APIs to also be pluggable. So while
the initial impl might be based on GParteD, we would have the option of
also providing a Conga based backend at a later date.

Regards,
Dan
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