[Libvir] Persistent Configurations?

[Anthony Liguori]

Howdy,

Thought I'd try to start up a discussion on a topic that I know I've 
discussed a lot with people in the past.

Xend currently stores its configurations in python files somewhere on 
the file system (usually in /etc/xen).  This is problematic from a 
management tool perspective because the python files may contain 
arbitrary python code (requiring a python interpreter to read) and 
there's no central location which makes enumerating possible domains 
quite difficult.

If you think about a typical use-case (or at least, my typical use-case 
:-)), a user is likely to have a larger number of domains than what are 
running (say a domain for a bunch of different distros for testing).  It 
would be nice if any management tools could see those domains and easily 
start them up.

I think we could achieve this with the following requirements:

1) Allow domain creation based on an opaque configuration object
2) Allow storing and retrieval of these configuration objects from the 
XenStore (using a user-specified path)

I think this isolates the state well enough that it leaves the majority 
of the library stateless.  Just some random thoughts...

Regards,

Anthony Liguori