[libvirt] Hyper-V driver ?

[Michael Sievers]

Hi !

My name ist Michael Sievers. I am studying computer science at
Paderborn/Germany. I worked together with Matthias Bolte on a project
here at Paderborn, where we evaluated the possibility of controlling
Microsoft Hyper-V using WS-Management through libvirt (which is
actually called WinRM on Windows).

At the end of the project I had a very minimalistic libvirt driver,
which was just able to connect to Hyper-V and to power cycle a given
VM.

Unfortunately, the project stopped at this point and so did my efforts
on this topic.

Since developing a full fledged Hyper-V driver for libvirt a very time
consuming effort I am currently searching for a way to do so which
incorporates with my study.

At this point I can tell you the following

- it is possible to control Hyper-V using libvirt using WS-Management
- this is actually the only way (as far as I know) to control Hyper-V
from non-Windows hosts, as you can not use WMI (which is Hyper-V main
API) from non Windows hosts directly
- WS-Management is the bridge to talk to WMI from non-Windows hosts as
there are implementations such as OpenWSman which you can use
- doing complicated things in WS-Management (e.g. calling a function
with reference parameters) is not well documented and that's why a
pain to implement

The last point was the main reason, why the development stopped after
implementing the power cycling.

Last week I talked to my professor about this and he told me, that
maybe there is a company (unfortunately I can't tell you the name)
which is willing to support this effort financially, which would give
me to opportunity to resume development. But sadly this not for sure,
yet.

I will inform you (the libvirt mailing list) during the next two weeks
about the results.

Cheers

Michael Sievers

P.S.

Sorry for sending this mail three times to libvir-list as I did not
remembered that I once subscribed with a different email address.

2010/10/30 Justin Clift <jclift at redhat.com>:
> On 10/30/2010 03:21 AM, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> <snip>
>> "WS-Management Protocol" points to
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384470%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
>> where "Web Services for Management (WS–Management)." points to
>> http://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0226.pdf
>>
>>  which says Page Not Found I find that lovely ...
>
> Heh.  The link you probably want is this one:
>
>  http://www.dmtf.org/standards/wsman
>
> My understanding of the Web Services Management thing, is that it's not
> a Microsoft initiative, but is instead a "vendor neutral" effort, and
> somehow involves CIM.
>
>
>> Matthias went through the huge work of developping SOAP code to talk
>> to ESX, I wonder how much could be reused for the SOAP to talk to
>> this.
>>
>> But it certainly requires someone dedicated for a long time, not sure
>> we will get someone who really needs this.
>
> Kind of wondering if our existing CIM stuff might "just work" with it
> already.  Not something I know anything about though. :)
>
>  http://libvirt.org/CIM/   <-- not much info here. :/
>  http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Libvirt-cim_setup
>
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