[libvirt-users] New libvirt guide

[Martin Kletzander]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 08:18:38PM -0500, David Ashley wrote:
>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.
>

Hi, that's awesome!  I had just a quick look at the outline and
added some comments in-line, but haven't though about anything major
to mention or describe (like a new chapter) as it always takes me a
huge amount of time to come up with such ideas.

>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

I don't know if you are planning to do that, but in case you don't
want to spend considerable amount of time explaining the XML and
setting up everything from scratch, it would be better to drop a hint
about virt-install and such.

>    Using virtual machines
>    Using Python to access VMs

I was wondering what kind of access are you planning to talk about in
this chapter, mainly since "How to programmatically access VMs" is the
third chapter and there is an intro to python's libvirt module.

>A sample problem
>    Problem statement
>    Solution requirements
>    Using VMs to solve the problem
>    New problems introduced by using VMs

This is very good thing to mention that people often forget to think
about in cases when they already decided to move to VMs for example.

>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

You could mention the possibility of keeping some data in the XML
itself, as there is a <metadata/> element just for that.

>    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

libvirt itself doesn't have any guest agent.  But libvirt can utilize
QEMU's guest agent and you probably meant that.  There's also spice's
guest agent called spice-vdagent that libvirt can setup, but does not
utilize in any way.

>        Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS
>        openSuse, SuSE
>        Ubuntu, Debian, Mint

Are these that different or is it just the matter of s/yum/yast/ or
s/yum/apt-get/ and similar? :)

>    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
>
>_______________________________________________
>libvirt-users mailing list
>libvirt-users at redhat.com
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvirt-users
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