[libvirt] VMware ESX driver announcement

[Matthias Bolte]

Hello,

I'm participate in a project of the Paderborn Center for Parallel
Computing, an institute of the University of Paderborn:
http://pc2.uni-paderborn.de

The project's goal is to use virtualization in a supercomputer
environment. We've decided to use libvirt to manage different
hypervisor. A subgoal is to extend the driver base of libvirt. We've
started an VMware ESX driver and are investigating Hyper-V support
(see next mail).

The ESX driver isn't complete yet, currently it supports:

- domain lookup by ID, UUID and name
- domain listing
- domain suspend and resume
- domain reboot, if the VMware tools are installed inside the domain
- domain start and shutdown
- domain migration

The driver uses the SOAP based VMware VI API. We've tried to generate
SOAP client code with gSOAP and looked at other SOAP libraries, but
the VI API uses inheritance in a way that gSOAP fails to generate C
code for. Because of this we wrote a minimal SOAP client based on
libcurl and libxml2 that can handle this inheritance problem in C.

The next item on the todo list is domain creation, because currently
the driver can only deal with prior existing domains.

We think this code might be useful for others and would be glad if the
driver could be merged into libvirt in medium term.

All of our work is licensed under LGPLv2+.
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