[et-mgmt-tools] [PATCH 11 of 11] virt-convert: Add "virt-instance" formatter

[Bryan Kearney]

John Levon wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 03:21:03PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> 
>> No, setup_install would not be neccessary. You could populate a
>> Guest object with all the data imported from another format,
>> and then call validate_parms and get_xml_config.
> 
> This sounds good, I'll look at doing this.
> 
>>> I'm a bit unclear on the need for this to be a requirement. It just
>>> seems to be placing unnecessary obstacles in the user's way. You're
>>> basically turning the warning above into an error for many situations.
>> If we don't require using an active libvirt connection, we will find
>> ourselves just duplicating information that is already presented by
>> libvirt capabilities xml, such as emulator paths, feature availability
>> like pae, and in the future, whitelists for device models, all with
>> varying degrees of accuracy.
> 
> Hmm. I don't think that's a big deal now at all (since virt-install is
> already encoding all this stuff *anyway*). But I thought about it, and
> you're right. This could become very tricky in the future.
> 
> However, there's still a problem I'm not sure how to deal with: general
> export.  In this case we might not even be exporting to a format that
> libvirt can even *deal* with, never mind one that's on the other end of
> the connection. What do we do in this case?
> 
> How can I export to .vmx without hard-coding some stuff based upon
> command-line options? Do we require a connection for this, and try to
> work out defaults based on the connection anyway? This is less
> than ideal: consider the poor user who's not booted under Xen, and wants
> to import his Xen VM into VMWare on that machine.

I agree.. I could see a 2 very common use cases:

1) I am running on hypervisorX, and I get an image for hypervisor Y 
which I want to play with. I should be able to convert Y to X without 
having Y running in my enterprise.

2) I am building appliances, and I want to support hypervisor Y. I 
should be able to build for my internal X and then convert to Y.


--bk