FWN/Beats/Virtualization

Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora virtualization technologies.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Enterprise Management Tools List

This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list

Managing Guest OS Types

Cole Robinson created a patch to provide a --list-os-options option to virt-install and virt-convert. Output from this option would be used to help users determine the appropriate argument for --os-type. The --os-type option is used to "Optimize the guest configuration for a type of operating system. This will attempt to pick the most suitable ACPI & APIC settings, optimally supported mouse drivers and generally accommodate other operating system quirks."

This touched off a discussion of how such information is managed. Daniel P. Berrange pointed out shortcomings in the current approach and perscribed the following fixes, and supplied an example XML file.

• An XML schema for defining all the information wrt to guest OS distros that is relevant to virt management tools.
• A C library for querying the information in the XML file(s).
• Bindings of the C library into Python/Ruby etc as needed
• Ability for local admins to extend / override the information either by editing the XML files directly, or a pretty GUI

Cole later dropped his patch and automated the creation of the OS list in the virt-install man page instead.

virt-manager Storage Removal

A patch from Cole Robinson "adds a storage aware delete dialog to virt-manager. When deleting a VM, we are presented with a list of storage attached to it, with an option to remove individual disks as part of the delete process."

virt-install Host Device Assignment Support

Cole Robinson added "support for host device assignment to virtinst and virt-install. This adds a --host-device command to "Attach a physical host device to the guest. HOSTDEV is a node device name as used by libvirt (as shown by 'virsh nodedev-list')."

Daniel P. Berrange described the management options for host devices.

• "If 'managed=yes' then libvirt will automatically detach the device from the host driver."
• "If 'managed=no' then libvirt expects that the caller has already ensured the device is detached from the host before *ALL* attempts to start the guest, now & in the future."

This change supports the KVM PCI Device Assignment feature in Fedora 11.

Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

User Interface Makeover for virt-manager

Daniel P. Berrange pointed out "there's a significant redesign of virt-manager in progress" and brought attention to Cole Robinson's 'New VM' wizard makeover. Daniel added "Many more design improvements are targetted for the next few virt-manager releases, impacting nearly every area of the UI, so keep an eye out for more UI review postings during F12 timeframe too."

New Release virtinst 0.4.2

Cole Robinson announced a new virtinst release, version 0.400.2.

python-virtinst is a module that helps build and install libvirt based virtual machines. It currently supports KVM, QEmu and Xen virtual machines. Package includes several command line utilities, including virt-install (build and install new VMs) and virt-clone (clone an existing virtual machine).

New features:

• New virt-clone option --original-xml, allows cloning a guest from an xml file, rather than require an existing, defined guest.
• New virt-install option --import, allows creating a guest from an existing disk image, bypassing any OS install phase.
• New virt-install option --host-device, for connecting a physical host device to the guest.
• Allow specifying 'cache' value via virt-install's --disk options (Ben Kochie)
• New virt-install option --nonetworks (John Levon)
• Lots of backend cleanups and documentation improvements.

Fedora Xen List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

dom0 Kernel Inches Closer

Pasi Kärkkäinen walked the bleeding edge while testing Xen dom0 host support. Using Fedora 10 with Xen 3.3.1-9 from Rawhide and a custom built 2.6.29-rc7 pv_ops dom0 kernel the system boots, but virt-install and virt-manager fail with the error "Unsupported virtualization type 'xen'".

It seems that /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities is not present for some unknown reason.

Libvirt List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

New Release libvirt 0.6.1

Daniel Veillard announced a new libvirt release, version 0.6.1.

Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes).

New features:

• new APIs for Node device detach reattach and reset (Mark McLoughlin)
• sVirt mandatory access control support (James Morris and Dan Walsh)

Improvements:

• don't hardcode ssh port (Guido Gunther)
• new test cases and testing infrastructure (Jim Meyering)
• improve the SExpr parser (John Levon)
• proper error reporting on xend shutdown command (John Levon)
• proper handling of errors when saving QEmu domains state (Guido Gunther)
• revamp of the internal error memory APIs (John Levon)
• better virsh error reporting (John Levon)
• more daemon options to allow running multiple daemons (Jim Meyering)
• error handling when creating a QEmu domain (Guido Gunther)
• fix timeouts in QEmu log reading (Guido Gunther)
• migration with xend 3.3 fixes (John Levon)
• virsh XML dump flags cleanup (Cole Robinson)
• fix build with loadable drivers (Maximilian Wilhelm)
• internal XML APIs to read long long and hexa values (Mark McLoughlin)
• function to parse node device XML descriptions and associated test (Mark McLoughlin)
• generate network bridge names if not provided (Cole Robinson)
• recognize ejectable media in hostdev hal driver (Cole Robinson)
• integration of sVirt (Daniel Berrange)

There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements, portability and bug fixes.

With about five weeks since the release of 0.6.0, Daniel added "So quite a bit of changes happened in one month of development, so it's getting clear we aren't really slowing down and keeping a relatively fast release cycle is needed. So expect 0.6.2 in a month or so."

sVirt Support Committed

Daniel P. Berrange applied the sVirt patches to enable selinux support in libvirt.

Secure Guest Migration Between Hosts

Chris Lalancette posted a request for comments on secure migration with an initial focus on Qemu. The proposal included two options. One leveraged existing RPC while the second created a new well known port to handle the migration. Using RPC adds a layer of authenitcation which may possibly be avoided in the second option by simply opening a new port in a firewall.

Sticking with existing RPC and enhancing the authentication system for migration seemed to be the consensus.

Hynesim Project Interest in Libvirt

Florian Vichot of the Hynesim project was interested in replacing their wrappers around KVM, VirtualBox, and OpenVZ with libvirt, and so asked about support for a number of features including auxiliary TAP devices in the host to correspond with ethernet devices in the guest.