On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 02:57:25PM -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote: > On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:46:28PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > > The current implementation of 'virsh create' takes an XML file as its only > > parameter & creates a domain from this. This is great if you have a suitable > > XML file already, but if you are just trying to automate some simple tasks > > from the shell then the need to use XML is a little cumbersome. Thus I was > > thinking perhaps we could have an alternate way to define a new VM (keep > > the current XML based way too of course) > > > > QEMU for example makes it very easy to launch a new VM: > > > > qemu -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso > > > > Taking inspiration from this syntax we could allow: > > > > virsh start -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso -name Foo > > > > Internally, the 'start' command would simply transform these command > > line args into the neccessary libvirt XML and then call the normal > > create functions. > > > > Another way would be have a 'genxml' command, which accepted these list > > of devices / config properties & then printed out appropriate XMl. This > > could be piped to the regular 'virsh create' command > > > > virsh genxml -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso \ > > -name Foo | virsh create - > > > > This isn't so critical for Xen, because people are already used to writing > > config files before creating the domain, but when we get a QEMU backend > > i think such a convenient method for defining new VMs will be neccessary > > to encourage users to use virsh instead of manually calling 'qemu'. Even > > for Xen users it would make shell script easier though :-) > > Okay, but this is dependant on the virtualization used, e.g. test and > xen XML will provide different output. But with the environment variable > patch this can be hidden from the command line. Yeah, if you don't set the env var, I'd expect the --connect parameter to be used in any case so we can easily generate appropriate XML > Either way is fine, actually the code is gonna be 90% the same, and both > ways sounds useful in slightly different contexts, why not both ? Sure :-) 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 -=|