[Ovirt-devel] Create VM page

[Chris Lalancette]

All,
    Scott, Alan, mdehaan and I had a discussion about the Create VM page today,
and in particular, the OS variants.  It seems that the general consensus before
was that OS variant should get folded into the "boot device" table.  Now, I'm
not going to start an argument about the UI; it's something I'm woefully
unprepared to discuss.  What I will describe is how it looks to me from
taskomatic's point of view.
    Basically, there are two important pieces of metadata we need to get during
the Create VM stage:

1)  The method of booting and installing (or provisioning).
2)  The OS type that is going to be installed.

These two pieces are related, but are actually different.  The first is things
like the location of the NFS (or HTTP, or FTP...you get the idea) tree, the
method to boot (CD, PXE, etc).  This is equivalent to the -l or -c parameter in
virt-install.

The second describes things we need to know about the guest, such as whether it
supports ACPI/APIC, whether it supports virtio, etc.  This is equivalent to the
--os-type and --os-variant options in virt-install.  It basically describes to
taskomatic what to put in the XML so that we can boot with the right options.

So, that being said, we need a way for the user to specify *both* of these.  In
the cobbler profile case, we can get the OS type information from cobbler (well,
in reality, cobbler doesn't store this at the moment, but dehaan said he would
add it).  In the non-cobbler case (either PXE, or CD, or whatever), we need to
allow the user to choose the OS type.  In either case, we will map what the user
specified (Fedora-9, say), to a bunch of individual options, and store it in the
database for taskomatic to pick up when creating the guest.

Anyway, I thought I would lay all of this out, to make sure everyone understood
what I was talking about, and I understood everyone else.

Chris Lalancette