[libvirt] Some questions about the libvirt ESX driver

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 09:29:10PM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote:
> I've never seen this error message from the ESX server before. Many
> errors reported by the ESX server contain a details section, but the
> deserialization of this details requires many new SOAP types and I
> haven't implemented this yet.

Can we get LIBVIRT_DEBUG=1 to just dump the SOAP response?

/me checks the source ...

It seems like currently debug output is hard-coded into a #define.
Having it wired to LIBVIRT_DEBUG would allow people to debug these
issues without needing to recompile.

> Can you start the domain using the VI client? Maybe the domain really
> is in a state where it cannot be started.

OK, turns out that the VMWare server was in "maintenance mode".

> What's wrong with it in your opinion? The <source file> attribute is
> correct. See the ESX driver website section [3] about this.

Nothing wrong with it, just a bit unusual.  But as you say, it is a
valid path according to ESX's unusual path convention.

> > (e) pool-list, net-list are not supported by the driver.
[...]
> I plan to implement the ESX driver as complete as possible, this
> includes network and storage handling. I've took a look at this some
> time ago and saw some problems. For examples datastores don't have a
> UUID, so I may need to make them up and store them somewhere like the
> IBM Power driver does it for the domain UUIDs, the libvirt network
> model cannot represent a vSwitch ... I think these drivers are much
> harder to implemented than the main ESX driver, so don't expect any
> news on this in the next weeks, but stay tuned :)
> 
> What do you mean by "to access the VMDK files that contain domains",
> just list them?

It's so that we can inspect the VM's disk, for virt-inspector:

  http://libguestfs.org/virt-inspector.1.html

Ideally we'd like to download all or part of the VM's disk (ie. VMDK
file(s)).

Thanks for your detailed reply!

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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