On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 12:23:13PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote: > Bryan Kearney wrote: > > We are starting to look at more interesting use cases around bringing in > > existing appliances into virt-manager. Joey has some interesting > > questions about driver, but I wanted to bring up an easier one. > > > > Some of public appliances which exist are raw disk images which can > > easily be booted, but have no virt-image xml file. The user can of > > course manually create the file, but I think it would be nice to have > > the tooling help this. I could see one of the following solutions. Can > > folks pipe in with comments on these or another approach? > > > > > (1) Create an "interactive" mode for virt-image which prompts the user. > > Interactive shouldn't be our first goal, if a goal at all. We > should design for the command line options and build a cli > wizard as an afterthought. > > > (2) Modify virt-image to allow for all data normally the xml to be > > passed at command line (example, add a --imagefile parameter) > > (3)Create a simple pre-processor to achieve 1 or 2 above. > > > > Hmm, the whole problem of taking an existing disk image and > turning into something useful is not handled well by any of > the virt-* tools. > > There needs to be an explicit way using one of the tools to > say 'Don't install anything on this, just build an xml file > with these options'. In turn there could be a flag to dump > out libvirt xml or virt-image xml. > > The main problem is, where do we do this? It really isn't all that much different from the live cd case where there's no installer either - in fact the live cd installer class in virtinst can basically do 90% of the neccessary stuff already - just doesn't need to bother with adding a CDROM device. > - virt-install: Seems the only option for libvirt xml, if > we want to define and start the guest. But what about just > dumping out the xml? Seems like it may be getting a bit > too ambitious. There are lots of virt-install options that > don't map well to virt-image, though we could just build > the xml and feed it through a libvirt xml -> virt-image > parser in virt-convert. How about just adding a '--preinstalled' flag, handled in the same way as --livecd, just causing it to skip install phase and boot it straight off. This could work in virt-manager too - in the wizard step where you select install source. You currently chose network install source, PXE, or local media. Simply add a fourth 'pre-installed'. All the rest of the wizard steps still apply, so we'd want to share all that. > - virt-image: no go for libvirt xml, but could be expanded > to build image xml, and probably the most consistent place > to do it. Yeah, I don't think its applicable for virt-image. virt-image is really focused on having all the domain metadata upfront and not prompting the user for it. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
