[libvirt] managing libvirt users in a one-server context

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:33:19AM -0400, Juan Miscaro wrote:
> I have a single KVM server on which I want to allow co-workers the
> ability to create vm's.  Here are my criteria in order of importance:
> 
> 1. I do not want to have to grant all users root privileges.
> 2. I would like the vm's to use the host's bridge (br0) by default.
> 3. I do not want one user to be able to start, stop, or (re)define the
> vm's created by another user by default.
> 4. I would like a user to be able grant access to another user.
> Mostly for viewing.
> 
> Can I do all this with hardcoded usernames and passwords?  If not,
> what is my best option?

Options 1, 3 & 4 pretty much all say that you should just have
each user using 'qemu:///session' URIs. This casues a 'libvirtd'
process to be spawned for each user, and are completely indepedant
accessible only to that user, though with a suitable libvirtd.conf
they could allow read-only access to other users

The only trouble is that they can't then use bridging :-(

Only the privileged qemu://system instance allows use of bridging and
we don't yet have fine grained access control on that, so anyone accessing
it can use any VM present.

So we don't really have a perfect solution for you that meets all these
requirements.

Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|