Hi, I wrote some patches against virt-install that make it possible to run virtual machines from VM images (aka appliances) Patches and additional docs are at http://people.redhat.com/dlutter/virt-image/ I'd appreciate comments/suggestions, both on the XML metadata format used to describe images and on the actual patches. David The README from the above URL: VM Image Support for virt-install ================================= This set of patches adds support for creating image-based virtual machines to virt-install. Image-based virtual machines make it possible to distribute VM images and allow users of such images to create VM's safely and with minimal understanding of the image. A VM image consists of an XML metadata file 'image.xml' and the disk images that back the VM's storage. The metadata format is described in detail in the file image.rng Some important points: * The metadata format allows specifying alternative ways of booting the VM, depending on the host platform. The code tries to find a matching boot descriptor using libvirt's capabilities; that matching code probably needs some love * Disk images can either be raw disk images or ISO images * Files referenced in the metadata (disk files, kernel, initrd etc.) are relative to the location of the metadata file. As a convention, they should be in the same directory as the metadata file. Trying it out ------------- To try out these patches you need to (a) apply the patches to virtinst and (b) create a metadata file for an existing VM image. To apply the patches: (1) Checkout virt-inst from mercurial: hg clone http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel virt-install (2) Put the patches into that directory: cd virt-install rsync -av http://people.redhat.com/virt-image/patches . (3) Apply them with quilt: quilt push -a (4) Run virt-image: chmod a+x ./virt-image ./virt-image --help The easiest way to create a VM image is to use your favorite existing VM with file-backed disks, and write an image.xml description file. Once you have that, you can look at the libvirt XML that would be used to start the VM with virt-image --image image.xml --print -name test --vnc and start it with virt-image --image image.xml -name test --vnc
