[Libvir] Storage manager initial requirements and thoughts

Hugh Brock hbrock at redhat.com
Fri Feb 9 21:18:32 UTC 2007


Hi all.

At the Red Hat virtualization team meeting last week we spent some time 
talking about the problem of remote storage management, which is a 
requirement for at the very least creating remote guests. Remote storage 
management also delivers a lot of benefits for managing guest storage, 
provisioning, and a host of other issues.

Note that we don't (I think) believe that storage management should be 
part of libvirt. However we might want to be able to grab storage 
information with libvirt when creating a guest, for example.

Here's the tentative requirements we came up with, along with several 
questions that came up.

We have two important use cases for remote storage management:
--Create a new guest against an existing physical device
--Create a new guest against a file on an existing physical device
      (SELinux context must match up on both)

Requirements:
2 key requirements: enumerate devices, create files

   * Enumerate devices (unallocated disks)
     * storage pool
       * Unallocated space
       * Allocated volumes
         -- free
	-- in use
       * Read only / Read-write
       * Host availability
       * Volume
         -- Global unique name
	-- Local device name
	-- Usage
	   -- Mounted locally
	   -- Assigned to guest
	      read only
	      shared
	      exclusive
	   -- Inactive guest
   * Create a backing store for a guest
     * need to know what storage is available
     * Can be plain file
     * Can be a physical partition (local scsi/IDE, SAN)
     * Can be a logical volume
     * Can be network - iscsi/nbd

Cases:
   Physical device
   --> create partitions

   Volume group
   --> create logical volumes

   Directory
   --> create files

Todos:
   Investigate gparted, one of the partition management tools we already 
have (apis? remote accessibility?) (I believe Jim Meyering volunteered 
to take a look at this?)
   Identify what other scenarios we need to address.

Please comment; I'm hoping we can get these into a more definite form 
sooner rather than later.

-- 
Red Hat Virtualization Group http://redhat.com/virtualization
Hugh Brock           | virt-manager http://virt-manager.org
hbrock at redhat.com    | virtualization library http://libvirt.org




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