[libvirt] Local qemu migration

[Eric Blake]

On 11/05/2014 01:28 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 05, 2014 at 01:16:08PM +0100, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 9:10 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Nope, there's stuff that's on the filesystem that is tied to the QEMU
>>> process and that would clash when migrating as you have two copies of
>>> the same VM running at the sme time.
>>>
>>
>> Ok, there is no guarantee that the VMs won't write concurrently to the disk
>> during migration?
>>
>> Also, there are cases where VM disks/images are readonly, or image-less VMs.
> 
> No, it isn't about the disk images. The actual guest CPUs are only executing
> in one QEMU at a time, so there's not a problem wrt disk image usage. The
> issue is with various other files we use. For example the QEMU monitor is a
> UNIX domain socket at a specific path - you can't have both QEMUs have the
> same UNIX domain socket. That's not under user control so we could change
> the monitor socket path, but the problem extends to stuff that is directly
> from the guest XML. ie VNC can be told to listen on a UNIX domain socket
> path. virtio-serial devices are typically bound to UNIX domain sockets.
> Serial ports, parallel ports, certain network device backends, and so on.

The monitor socket location is different for qemu:///system than for
qemu:///session (or when going between two different users'
qemu:///session).  But things like the VNC port do start to be an issue.

> 
> Migration fundamentally requires that the two QEMU processes involved have
> completely separate filesystem namespaces, which effectively means separate
> hosts (or at least separate containers which is effectively the same thing)
> 
>> Except the obvious testing case, there are other use cases that could be
>> interesting: moving a running VM from system to session libvirt, or the
>> other way around, or to a different user.
> 
> Migrating from session to system libvirt or vica-verca isn't something
> that is reasonable to support either because of the different privilege
> levels. The session QEMU will require the disk images to be owned by
> one user account, the system QEMU will require them to be owned by a
> different user account. We can't chown the images to satisfy both the
> system and session QEMU at the same time.

This, coupled with the fact that we don't allow connection to a remote
qemu:///session instance (right now, the RPC code assumes that it will
only connect to qemu:///system), means that it is not possible to do
live migration in or out of a session instance, regardless of whether it
is on the same machine, and regardless of whether it is between the
session libvirtd of two different users.

It might be possible to migrate to file (such as virsh save), then
update permissions on the save file and other resources, then reload
from that file; but it is not a live migration.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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