[libvirt] Idea for representing VMX virtualHW.version in domain XML

[Daniel P. Berrange]

At the Xen Hackathon we were discussing dealing hypervisors which have
a "virtual hardware version" concept, like VMWares' virtualHW.version.

Currently our code mostly ignores the virtualHW.version when reading
VMX files, and when writing them, just uses the hypervisor's default
virtual hardware version.  This is sub-optimal since that means the
guest's hardware version could change if the hypervisor is upgraded,
which could in turn cause Windows re-activation.

It was suggested to me that the virtualHW.version is really akin to
QEMU's machine type concept, and so we should map it that way in
the XML.

eg if the VMX file contains

  virtualHW.version = "4"

Then we might represent that in the XML as

<domain type='vmware'>
  ...
  <os>
    <type machine="vmware4">hvm</type>
  </os>
  ...
</domain>

ie we just invent a machine type prefix and append the version number
to it.

I'm not planning on implementing this myself, just sending this mail
so the idea is in the historical record and some other motivated
person can wire it up....

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|