[libvirt-users] qemu:///session and network-mounted home directories

[Spencer Baugh]

Dear libvirt-users,

Suppose my home directory is network mounted on to several different
machines. And suppose I defined some VMs in qemu:///session. The
configuration files and disk images for qemu:///session are stored in my
home directory.

Now suppose I log in to some machine and use virsh. The qemu:///session
VMs that are marked autostart are started. Now if I log into another
machine and use virsh, it will presumably try to start my autostart VMs
again, since the same configuration is present in both homedirs.

Is there anything libvirt does that might prevent it from starting the
same VM multiple times on different machines? Or might allow
machine-specific autostart configuration? Maybe something could be done
with /etc/machine-id!

In terms of qemu:///system, this is like having /var/lib/libvirt/images/
live on a network-mounted filesystem (fairly normal I assume) and also
having /etc/libvirt/qemu live on a network-mounted filesystem (not as
normal). Not sure how you would deal with the issue there either but I
can see why you might want to have your same VM configuration available
on all hosts, so it would be cool to figure out that problem as
well.

The answer may be the VM configuration is host-specific, so sharing VM
configuration between hosts is not a good idea. In that case, any other
recommendations on how to deal with the networked homedir case?

Thanks!