[Libvir] [PATCH][RFC] Adding Cloning Feature

[Daniel Veillard]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 02:51:50PM +0900, Kazuki Mizushima wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> >I think cloning is a great feature.  From when I used to sysadmin a Xen 
> >server, I used cloning as the main technique to create new servers - ie. 
> >take an existing machine which is similar to the new one which I want, 
> >and just clone it.
> 
> 
> Thank you for your comments and agreement.
> 
> >There is no problem with interaction with the remote patch.  Nor do you 
> >have to worry about the remote stuff when implementing this (the "dd" 
> >will fork on the remote libvirtd automagically).
> 
> O.K. I understood it. 
> I warry about remote support for libvirt architecture always.
> 
> >So the idea is that you can only clone an inactive domain?
> 
> This first revision, only inactive domain. But next step, 
> I think snapshot command will be able to used instead of "dd".

  I would suggest like Dan Berrange that you look at integrating that
feature in virt-manager. There is far more similarities with existing
operations, 'appliance' support is being added (for at least some semantic
of that term), and cloning is in this respect just one more way to
provision a domain.
  If you are really expecting to push in libvirt to get remote support
when it comes you need to consider the fact that this will not be possible
until we get management operation for storage (snapshotting, partitionning
and copy) and we didn't even started to really discuss this issue (and other
developments like NUMA may preempt the effort in the group).
  I would feel way more comfortable doing an analysis of all the requirement
to have a really working clone support in libvirt if we had a good working
experience of at the virt-manager level. Like creation this is an entry point
which could get a really wide array of options and settings, trying to
implement a premature version there would not be productive.
  So I encourage you to try to rework it in the framework of virt-manager
it should also be quite simpler to do all this prototyping in Python than
C, honnestly this really look the best way forward at this point.

Daniel

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