[et-mgmt-tools] Greatly improved Xen support for koan

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 06:24:13PM -0500, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> For those using Cobbler for virtualization installs, I've commited a 
> change to the Mercurial repository that you will probably be interested 
> in.  
> 
> Basically koan now uses the "virtinst" library to install virtualized 
> images rather than using "libvirt" directly.    "virtinst" is the same 
> library that virt-manager uses to install virtual machines.   So, how 
> does this affect the running of koan?
> 
> -- The biggest change is that koan now terminates very quickly, with the 
> rest of the virtual installation going on in the background.    This 
> allows multiple parallel virtual installs if someone wants to do it.   
> This should make koan much more usable in batch context.   If you want 
> to watch the installation progress, usage of xm or virt-manager will 
> allow that).
> -- Koan also names each virtual system after the mac address they are 
> created with, such that they are unique.  So no more "xenguest" and 
> "xenguest_1" kind of thing, which was error prone when you installed a 
> machine and then it crashed, causing naming conflicts.   (--xen-name 
> will probably be removed from cobbler also, as it's no longer needed).  
> If you are using koan with "--system" instead of "--profile", the MAC 
> address can be controlled from cobbler, along with other fine tunning 
> arguments.  If not, it will be randomly generated.   If anyone has any 
> objections to this naming scheme, you might want to speak up.  I can 
> think of a couple of alternate ways to name domains automatically -- 
> "$profilename_$timestamp" isn't so bad.
> -- Koan no longer writes any files to /var/koan -- anywhere, because it 
> doesn't have to.   
> 
> This is still undergoing some testing, but I would call it very stable 
> at this point.   I'm just going to be tweaking output and error handling 
> a bit, if anything.
> Further down the road, this will enable koan to do hardware virtual 
> installs and handle other virtualization types.  
> 
> Note that depending on what distro you are running, Xen will save the 
> configuration files in one of the following:
> /etc/xen
> /var/lib/xen
> /var/run/xen

Scrub those last two - its /etc/xen  or /var/lib/xend/domains

> So, if you have domains that get stopped, looking in those directories 
> will tell you which ones you have to start.   Also on FC6 and later you 
> can experiment with "virsh" for management of inactive domains.

In particular you can do

  virsh list --all       or    virsh list --inactive

And once you know the name, 

  virsh start  <foo>

Or to delete a failed install

  virsh undefine <foo>

This is available in FC6 or F7   (basically need libvirt 0.1.10 or
later)

Dan.
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