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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 12:45:30PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 11:54:11AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 12:47:34PM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote:
> > > 2011/1/13 Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com>:
> > > > 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.
> > 
> > So you're stuck with modelling it in the libvirt XML somehow.
> > 
> > I will just add that a current RFE is to make virt-inspector work on
> > install CDs.  The idea is in virt-manager that we have it
> > automatically fill in the OS hints based on the ISO you try to use.
> 
> What we're trying todo with libosinfo is to kind of reverse the
> current approach, so we don't need any probing at all. The libosinfo
> database will actually contain metadata about where the install media
> can be obtained (admin specified local ISO/URL paths, and/or some
> default internet URL install paths, etc). Currently virt-manager asks
> the user to fill in a ISO path or URL for their OS, and then probes
> it to find out what type of OS. With libosinfo integrated, the user
> would simply be shown a list of OS, and pick one off the list. Then
> virt-manager would query libosinfo to find out the URL/ISO path and
> all the hardware support metadata associated with it without needing
> to probe.
[...]

I agree this is a better approach.  It's what we did with virt-ctrl
back in the day :-)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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