[libvirt] Driver ESX

[Matthias Bolte]

2011/2/18 Cédric Penas <cedric.penas at hesge.ch>:
> Hi,
>
> I am currently working on a project where I must develop a function to clone
> domain for the driver ESX.
> I immediately saw that the function cloneVM_Task () from VMware API was not
> supported for standalone ESX.

Do you mean that the ESX driver doesn't use CloneVM_Task() or that the
ESX server returns an NotImplemented fault for a call to
CloneVM_Task()?

> Does anyone know the best way to still implement this function or a
> workaround ?
> Why is it not already implemented ?

It's not implemented in libvirt, because libvirt doesn't have a
virDomainClone() function, so there is no way for the ESX driver to
use CloneVM_Task().

The virt-clone tool uses several libvirt functions to perform a clone
operation. The basics steps are:

- get the domain XML description of the domain to clone
- determine the storage volumes to clone
- issue a virStorageVolCreateXMLFrom() for each storage volume to be cloned
- update the storage volume references in the domain XML description;
remove the uuid and mac addresses to get new ones
- define a new domain from the edited domain XML description

You should be able to implement a clone operation for ESX on top of
libvirt without the need to change libvirt.

Or try to use virt-clone for ESX. IIRC virt-clone currently doesn't
handle the VMware path format properly so it might need some tweaks.

Matthias