[libvirt] How to keep VM definitions in sync across hosts?

[Thomas Treutner]

On Saturday 14 November 2009 18:07:48 Matthias Bolte wrote:
> 2009/11/14 Thomas Treutner <thomas at scripty.at>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > is there any best-practice how to keep VM definitions in sync across a
> > couple of hosts? Is it reasonable to put /etc/libvirt/qemu/ on a NFS
> > share? Or are there better ways? How does oVirt solve that?
>
> There was a similar question some weeks ago. The short answer is: No,
> it's not safe to share /etc/libvirt/qemu/.
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-October/msg00031.html

Ah, thx for the pointer!

> Why do you think the domain configs have to be available to all nodes?

Because I'm coming from Xen and now finally had time to switch to KVM and 
there's no regretting anything, but some rethinking neccessary :)

When using Xen, it's AFAIK necessary to have the domain configs available at 
all nodes which one wants to migrate a VM to.

> The default migration semantic of libvirt is to "blame" here. A
> migrated domain stays defined on the source node and is transient on
> the destination node. A transient domain has no persistent config on
> its node and is lost when destroyed.

Thats very cool! Just to be on the secure side of life: I assume a transient 
VM can be target of setmem, etc.pp., be migrated again (and of course will be 
transient at the target again), ... , and the only "shortcome" is that its 
config is lost when it is destroyed?

> Chris Lalancette committed a patch a month ago that adds two new
> migration flags. This commit was applied after the release of 0.7.2,
> it will be part of release 0.7.3.
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-October/msg00318.html
>
> VIR_MIGRATE_PERSIST_DEST makes a domain persistent on the destination
> node, libvirt writes a config to disk.
>
> VIR_MIGRATE_UNDEFINE_SOURCE removes the domain config on the source node.
>
> If you migrate a domain using this two flags then the domain takes its
> config with it. So there is no need to have the domain configs
> available on all nodes.

Thanks again - very interesting. I'm really impressed by the features of 
libvirt more and more. 

I think the second reason (beneath live migration) for thinking about keeping 
domain configs in sync was the necessity to be able to *start* VMs at an 
arbitrary host (hardware failures, whatever), but for that, I can use svn 
etc. and do a virsh define before starting.



kr,
tom