[libvirt-users] New libvirt guide

[David Ashley]

All -

Let me introduce myself. I am W. David Ashley, the primary author of the 
"Libvirt Application Development Guide Using Python" which will soon be 
published on the libvirt.org web site. I hope all of you will enjoy the 
new guide when it becomes available.

I have multiple decades of experience in writing documentation and 
training guides and I have about eight years of experience using libvirt 
and qemu/kvm virtual machines. Most of that experience was in creating 
and maintaining VM on-demand systems.

In the meantime, I am planning a new guide and I would appreciate some 
feedback from the libvirt user community concerning the potential 
usefulness and contents of the new guide. The proposed title of the 
guide will be "Automating Virtual Machines". The current (very) rough 
outline is:

Introduction
     Intro to virtual machines
     Installing virtual machines
     Using virtual machines
     Using Python to access VMs
A sample problem
     Problem statement
     Solution requirements
     Using VMs to solve the problem
     New problems introduced by using VMs
How to programmatically access VMs
     Intro to the python libvirt module
     How to connect to a VM
     How to access and control a guest domain
     Information the python libvirt module can not provide
Storing information about VMs
     Deciding what information should be stored
     Using simple text files
     Using a simple database
     Securing your information
How to set up a VM on demand environment
     Discovering a VMs ip address
     Using cron to start processes
     Starting up a VM
     Invoking a program on the VM
         Using SSH to access a VM
     Shutting down a VM
     Alternatives to starting/stopping a VM
Using the libvirt guest agent
     Installing the libvirt guest agent
         Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS
         openSuse, SuSE
         Ubuntu, Debian, Mint
     Using (querying) the libvirt guest agent
Logging VM activities
     Host activities
     VM activities
Securing your VMs
     Host security
     VM security

Any feedback/suggestions you have will be appreciated and I assure you 
they will be given serious consideration. At this point, nothing has 
been written except this rough outline so this is your chance to help 
form the contents or even make suggestions for a completely different guide.

Feel free to post back to this list or send me private email.

W. David Ashley
w.david.ashley at gmail.com