[libvirt] Web Interface -> LibVirt Communication?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 02:31:15PM +0100, Henri Cook wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to write a web tool that lets me administer my cluster from one 
> location (including operations that things like virt-manager don't 
> provide) - what's the proper way of achieving this? Can i communicate 
> over TCP with libvirt on each server (is this documented?) or should I 
> be trying to get my web app to auth and run virsh commands over SSH?

Libvirt provides full remote management in its APIs using secure TCP
channels. There is a choice of

  - TLS + x509 certs
  - Kerberos
  - Digest-MD5 (username+password)
  - SSH tunnel + SSH agent

All of these 4 options provide authentication and data encryption of
the sesion. There is more info on the plus & minuses of these here:

  http://libvirt.org/remote.html
  http://libvirt.org/auth.html

I don't recommend using virsh from your webapp - use one of the real
APIs, either C, Python, Perl, OCaml or Java.

You may also be interested in the oVirt project which is aiming to 
provide a large scale web based management UI

  http://ovirt.org/

Daniel
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