[libvirt] Some questions about the libvirt ESX driver

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I'm playing with VMWare ESX 4.0 and I decided to try driving it from
libvirt [git version].  Here are some random questions and issues I
encountered, in no particular order.

Listing domains works fine, but:

(a) I have to specify ?no_verify=1 to get it to ignore the lack of
valid https certificate.  Is there some documentation on how to set up
certificates correctly?  [vSphere gives exactly the same error]

(b) I have to type the root password (of the ESX server) each time.
Can I avoid that?

$ sudo ./tools/virsh -c 'esx://192.168.2.121/?no_verify=1' list --all
Enter username for 192.168.2.121 [root]:
Enter root password for 192.168.2.121:
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  - TestLinux            shut off
  - TestWin              shut off

(c) Starting domains doesn't seem to work, and the error message is
obscure:

$ sudo ./tools/virsh -c 'esx://192.168.2.121/?no_verify=1' start TestLinux
Enter username for 192.168.2.121 [root]:
Enter root password for 192.168.2.121:
error: Failed to start domain TestLinux
error: internal error HTTP response code 500 for call to 'PowerOnVM_Task'. Fault: ServerFaultCode - The operation is not allowed in the current state.

Is this to do with the "ask questions" API that was discussed on this
list before?  Specifying auto_answer=0 or auto_answer=1 didn't make
any difference.

(d) dumpxml XML output looks very good, and consistent with the other
drivers.  However it produces an odd <source file> attribute:

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='lsilogic'/>
      <source file='[Storage1] TestLinux/TestLinux.vmdk'/>
      <target dev='sda' bus='scsi'/>
    </disk>
    <disk type='file' device='cdrom'>
      <source file='[Storage1] Fedora-12-x86_64-Live.iso'/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='ide'/>
    </disk>

(e) pool-list, net-list are not supported by the driver.

That's a particular problem for me because I was really hoping to use
the storage APIs from libvirt to access the VMDK files that contain
domains (eg. [Storage1] TestLinux/TestLinux.vmdk in the example
above).  Is support for storage (particularly) and/or networks on the
horizon for this driver?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top