[libvirt] esx driver: XML format for guest OS type/variant

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 09:50:52AM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote:
> Actually, for the ESX/VMware and VirtualBox driver I don't really care
> about detailed OS inspection, I think. The initial point was that some
> hypervisors allow to specify OS type and distro in order to enable OS
> dependent stuff like optimizations and workarounds. But libvirt
> currently doesn't allow you to specify this in the XML config in order
> to pass this information to the driver.
>
> FYI, here's a (probably incomplete) list of guest OS types used by
> VMware: http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-guestos.html

libvirt goes about this in a different way: it expects the higher
level management tool to choose the right devices for the new guest
(which is essentially what virt-manager / virt-install do when you
give them the OS hint).

It's probably impossible from the ESX driver itself, but you could run
virt-inspector on the domain and translate the result into a suitable
guestOS string.  virt-inspector supports a large proportion of the
OSes listed.

I agree with what you said earlier: this either needs to be modelled
explicitly in libvirt, or else you can add an esx:-specific XML
namespace to carry this extra data.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
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