[libvirt] VMware ESX driver progress

[Matthias Bolte]

2009/7/23 Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com>:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 04:58:50PM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> the development was hindered by our testing cluster being offline
>> since 2 weeks due to server room cooling system maintenance. But I
>> finally got a basic version of dump-XML done, that fills all fields of
>> the virDomainDef that the VMX file contains data for.
>>
>> Changes since first announcement:
>>
>> - Move code into esx subdirectory
>> - Add esxNodeGetInfo()
>> - Fix esxDomainGetInfo() to report the correct value for memory
>> - Add memory and max-memory getter/setters
>> - Add CPU scheduler getter/setters
>> - Validate a migration before trying to perform it
>> - Replace esxUtil_Strdup() with strdup() and remove
>> esxUtil_MigrateStringFromLibXML()
>> - Add esxVI_EnsureSession() to handle expiring sessions
>> - Separate VI client code into multiple files and generate most of the
>> type handling code with macros
>> - Add esxDomainDumpXML() based on esxVMX_ParseConfig()
>>
>> The ESX driver isn't complete yet, currently it supports:
>>
>> - domain lookup by ID, UUID and name
>> - domain listing
>> - domain info retrieval
>> - domain suspend and resume
>> - domain start and destroy
>> - domain reboot and shutdown, if the VMware tools are installed inside
>> the domain
>> - domain migration with previous validation
>> - domain memory configuration
>> - domain CPU amount and scheduler configuration
>> - domain XML-dump
>> - domain XML-from-native (VMX)
>> - node info retrieval
>> - node hostname retrieval
>
>  It's in ! I have no way to really test it (except for the phantom
> trick) but it's commited in git, congratulations, well done !

Thanks!

If you have a computer with a supported NIC (an Intel NIC will do) and
some time, you could download the stripped down ESXi 3.5
60-days-evaluation version from VMware, dd it onto an USB thumb drive,
boot from it and provide some storage via NFS from a second computer.
You could also provide storage from a local harddisk if you have a
supported SCSI controller (SATA may also work, I'm not sure). That's
how I started playing with ESX before we had out testing cluster
available.

Regards,
  Matthias