[libvirt] (no subject)

[mike.hinz at yr20.com]

I had originally posted a plea for help on the virt-manager related list, but the same issue exists with virsh and this list seems to have higher traffic.  I'd been chatting on the irc channel with various people about this, but wanted to put this on the mail list for the record and to also raise a philosophical question. 

First, we've confirmed that Fedora 11 preview (fully updated) has an issue with properly mounting NFS shares without the noacl option.  Fedora 10 works fine with regard to mounting NFS shares.  That issue causes problems when attempting to write files to an NFS share and more importantly, for this group, causes problems when attempting to create an NFS based storage pool and then subsequently creating volumes on said NFS share.  That bug is 499178.  This was all figured out with Openfiler support and with the support of the fine folks working on libvirt and virt-manager.  There is a somewhat ugly workaround for this and I can describe it in case anyone is interested.

Now comes the philosophy piece:  It seems like that the way that libvirt and virt-manager want to handle storage is to be able to fully control the mounting process.  That seems to me to be a very nice thing as you have a single way to manage storage along with your VMs.  However, at least with respect to NFS, there are a number of parameters that people might need to give to the mount command for things like performance optimization and who knows what else.  Note that this is a consideration completely aside from the bug issue above.  It seems to me that either you have to just use the user created mount points, either manually or by fstab OR you have to allow all the possible options to be passed if you want to fully control the process.  Right now, it's tricky to do, if you want to get paras passed for tuning or whatever and requires some tricky handwork to get it done.   

One way to accomplish this from the user input perspective would be to add an 'options' input field that could take multiple parameters on the step 2 of 2 page of the 'add storage pool' function.  

So, is my thinking all screwed up about this or is there merit to this concept?  I tend to think, at least right now, that the logical thing is to either have the user create the mount points through the normal mechanisms that have in place roughly forever and then you just ask for what these are with respect to the NFS pools or you have to allow for user to pass the required parameters via your mechanism, although there are certainly many, many options when it comes to NFS.  

Thanks for all the help to date!  I hope the above is helpful!

Regards,

 

Mike Hinz
President
YR20
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