[Libguestfs] Man pages for virt-p2v-server?

[Matthew Booth]

On 29/09/11 03:20, Greg Scott wrote:
> I spoke too soon...
>
> I booted my Win2003 host from a virt-v2v CD, 0.8.3 I think, made a
> couple weeks ago.  It prompted for a hostname and root password, which I
> supplied.  And then a message appeared on the bottom in red, "Remote
> server does not define any profiles in /etc/virt-v2v.conf"
>
> So looking at /etc/virt-v2v.conf and studying its man page, it looks
> like virt-v2v.conf does have a couple of profiles defined, some with
> method RHEL, some with method libvirt.  If I'm understanding how this
> works, that method line defines the output of a migration.  And other
> profile attributes are equivalents for virt-v2v command switches.  But
> then it has a few<network>  sections that don't look like they are part
> of any profile.
>
> So apparently that virt-v2v CD is looking for a particular profile
> relevant to the host it boots from, or maybe a profile with certain
> specific attributes.  How do I figure out what this profile should look
> like?

I prefer to call these 'target profiles', because they define the target 
of a conversion. That is, they define what the target is (RHEV or 
libvirt), where it is, what guest storage format will be written there 
and how the guest's networks will be connected there. Incidentally, the 
network mappings which aren't inside a profile are global defaults. They 
existed before we added profiles, and they're still useful so we haven't 
deprecated them.

The example virt-v2v.conf contains 3 example profiles. However, because 
they're only examples they're commented out[1], which is why the P2V 
client complained about it. In fact, *everything* in the default config 
file is commented out now. This is because we moved the 
not-really-user-facing config to /var/lib/virt-v2v/virt-v2v.db.

In short, edit your virt-v2v.conf, copy one of the 3 example profiles 
and change the specifics. The man page explains what all the attributes 
mean.

>
> And then a feature request - I wonder if it would be easier all around
> if the virt-p2v CD would prompt for the attributes it wants instead of
> looking for a profile on the conversion host?  If prompting is not
> feasible, is there any guidance available or maybe some template
> profiles to use when migrating with virt-p2v?

I considered this at the time and rejected it. I wanted to keep the P2V 
client as simple as possible, and centrally defined profiles seemed a 
good way to achieve this. I'm not completely wedded to this decision: if 
I'm convinced that definition on the client is simpler I might change 
it. However, I'm not yet convinced.

Matt

[1] Incidentally this is easy to miss if, like me, you're used to syntax 
highlighting. This is because the file doesn't have a .xml extension, 
and vim at least won't highlight it. If you manually 'set filetype=xml' 
in vim it'll switch on highlighting, and the commented sections are easy 
to see. If you're an emacs user, enjoy your RSI ;)
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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