[Fedora-xen] starting a vm with virt-manager

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 04:14:03PM +0100, Henning Sprang wrote:
> Hi,
> Somehow I'd expect such a nice graphical tool as virt.manager, that,
> if I can install, (and start the installed machine directly after
> install), stop, restore, and do all the other nice things with a xen
> vm, I must also be able to simply start a vm for which I have a config
> lying around.
> 
> But I see nowhere any "start a vm" option. The only thing that is
> there is a "restore vm" option, but when I chose a normal vm config
> file, it always says "error restring domain - is the domain already
> running".
> I assume, this function is really only for domains that I saved (not
> the same as  opposed to shut down, at leat in xen terminology).
> 
> Is that right? Am I right that virt.manager has no functionality to
> simply start a vm with it's config file, and I must do this manually?

The problem is ultimately in XenD itself - the RPC protocol used for
managing VMs has no spport for inactive guests - the 'xm' command line
tool has this functionality hardcoded in itself so its not exposed to
other tools via the API. The new Xen 3.0.4 released 2 weeks ago does
now have inactive guest support, so Xen in Fedora 7 will likely support
this. 

For the Xen 3.0.3 in Fedora Core 6, we have had to write some extra code
in libvirt to manage inactive domains by bypassing XenD. This was just
pushed to Fedora updates in libvirt 0.1.10  a few days back. Thus I will
now be able to enable support for inactive domains in the next release
of virt-manager - hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

So, yes, you are right that there is no way to start an existing guest
using virt-manager in Fedora today. We are actively implemnenting this
so expect it to appear in the near future....

Regards,
Dan.
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