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 -
What use better command name instead "genxml"? For example "domgen".
(we have dominfo, domstate, ...).
Same odd commad name is "dumpxml"... XML of what? It should be
renamed to "domdump".
> 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 :-)
I can imagine more commands like:
virsh> bufread /etc/xen/Foo.xml
virsh> bufedit Foo -hdc /path/file.img
virsh> create --frombuf Foo
I think it could be nice for playful admins and developers. Or is
over engineering? ;-)
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak@xxxxxxxxxx>