[libvirt] New Libvirt Implementation - OpenNebula

[Daniel Veillard]

On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 12:23:47PM +0100, Ruben S. Montero wrote:
> Dear all,
>         You may find of interest a new implementation of the libvirt 
> virtualization API. This new implementation adds support to OpenNebula, a 
> distributed VM manager system. The implementation of libvirt on top of a 
> distributed VM manager, like OpenNebula, provides an abstraction of a whole 
> cluster of resources (each one with its hypervisor). In this way,  you can use 
> any libvirt tool (e.g. virsh, virt-manager) and XML domain descriptions at a 
> distributed level. 
> 
> For example, you may create a new domain with 'virsh create', then OpenNebula 
> will look for a suitable resource, transfer the VM images and boot your VM 
> using any of the supported hypervisors. The distributed management is 
> completely transparent to the libvirt application. This is, a whole cluster 
> can be managed as any other libvirt node.
> 
> The current implementation is targeted for libvirt 0.4.4, and includes a patch 
> to the libvirt source tree (mainly to modify the autotools files), and a 
> libvirt driver.
> 
> More information and download instructions can be found at:
> 
> * http://trac.opennebula.org/wiki/LibvirtOpenNebula
> * http://www.opennebula.org

  Interesting, but this raises a couple of questions:
    - isn't OpenNebula in some way also an abstraction layer for the
      hypervisors, so in a sense a libvirt driver for OpenNebula 
      is a bit 'redundant' ? Maybe i didn't understood well the
      principles behind OpenNebula :-) (sorry first time I learn about
      this).
    - what is the future of that patch ? Basically libvirt internals
      changes extremely fast, so unless a driver gets included as part
      of libvirt own code source, there is a lot of maintainance and
      usability problems resulting from the split. Do you intent to
      submit it for inclusion, or is that more a trial to gauge interest ?
      Submitting the driver for inclusion means the code will have to be
      reviewed, released under LGPL, and a voluteer should be available
      for future maintainance and integration issues.

  thanks !

Daniel

-- 
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