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

[Matthias Bolte]

2011/1/13 Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com>:
> 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).

Yes, I'm aware of that.

> 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.

That won't work in general, as you want to set the guest OS type in
the VMX config before you install the guest OS.

Matthias