On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 06:24:13PM -0500, Michael DeHaan wrote: > For those using Cobbler for virtualization installs, I've commited a > change to the Mercurial repository that you will probably be interested > in. > > Basically koan now uses the "virtinst" library to install virtualized > images rather than using "libvirt" directly. "virtinst" is the same > library that virt-manager uses to install virtual machines. So, how > does this affect the running of koan? > > -- The biggest change is that koan now terminates very quickly, with the > rest of the virtual installation going on in the background. This > allows multiple parallel virtual installs if someone wants to do it. > This should make koan much more usable in batch context. If you want > to watch the installation progress, usage of xm or virt-manager will > allow that). > -- Koan also names each virtual system after the mac address they are > created with, such that they are unique. So no more "xenguest" and > "xenguest_1" kind of thing, which was error prone when you installed a > machine and then it crashed, causing naming conflicts. (--xen-name > will probably be removed from cobbler also, as it's no longer needed). > If you are using koan with "--system" instead of "--profile", the MAC > address can be controlled from cobbler, along with other fine tunning > arguments. If not, it will be randomly generated. If anyone has any > objections to this naming scheme, you might want to speak up. I can > think of a couple of alternate ways to name domains automatically -- > "$profilename_$timestamp" isn't so bad. > -- Koan no longer writes any files to /var/koan -- anywhere, because it > doesn't have to. > > This is still undergoing some testing, but I would call it very stable > at this point. I'm just going to be tweaking output and error handling > a bit, if anything. > Further down the road, this will enable koan to do hardware virtual > installs and handle other virtualization types. > > Note that depending on what distro you are running, Xen will save the > configuration files in one of the following: > /etc/xen > /var/lib/xen > /var/run/xen Scrub those last two - its /etc/xen or /var/lib/xend/domains > So, if you have domains that get stopped, looking in those directories > will tell you which ones you have to start. Also on FC6 and later you > can experiment with "virsh" for management of inactive domains. In particular you can do virsh list --all or virsh list --inactive And once you know the name, virsh start <foo> Or to delete a failed install virsh undefine <foo> This is available in FC6 or F7 (basically need libvirt 0.1.10 or later) Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|
