Xenner: How to manage domains with virsh?

[Felix Schwarz]

Hi,

I got xenner to run on Fedora 9. And so far it seems that it is able to run at 
least some of my paravirtualized guests which I created on Xen/Fedora 8.

Now the problem is how I can manage these domains using virsh? I can start a 
Xenner domain using "xenner (and bunch of options)". Everything seems to be
fine.

But "virsh list" does not show any active domains. So how can add the 
configuration to virsh so that I can do something like "virsh start mydomain"?
Is this possible at all in the current Xenner (using Fedora 9 with all 
released updates but nothing from updates-testing)?

fs

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 02:46:57PM +0200, Felix Schwarz wrote:
>  I got xenner to run on Fedora 9. And so far it seems that it is able
> to 
>  run at least some of my paravirtualized guests which I created on 
>  Xen/Fedora 8.
>
>  Now the problem is how I can manage these domains using virsh? I can 
>  start a Xenner domain using "xenner (and bunch of options)". Everything 
>  seems to be fine.
>
>  But "virsh list" does not show any active domains. So how can add the  
>  configuration to virsh so that I can do something like "virsh start 
>  mydomain"?
>  Is this possible at all in the current Xenner (using Fedora 9 with all  
>  released updates but nothing from updates-testing)? 
I'm not exactly sure if support for Xenner has actually gone
into libvirt yet.  I know Dan is working on a patch.

At the moment libvirtd only tries to manage qemu/kvm/xenner
processes which are started up by it.  The reason is that the
daemon keeps a pipe open to the qemu monitor so it can issue
commands.  If you start a guest up by hand, then libvirtd
doesn't know about it and doesn't have access to the monitor.

We did discuss a way to work around this, but it's not in
libvirtd at this time.

Rich.

[Felix Schwarz]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  I'm not exactly sure if support for Xenner has actually gone
>  into libvirt yet.  I know Dan is working on a patch. (...) 
Thanks for your explanation, Rich. Much appreciated :-)

And thanks to all those developers making Xen+paravirt_ops a reality!

fs

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 05:30:42PM -0400, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 02:46:57PM +0200, Felix Schwarz wrote:
>  > I got xenner to run on Fedora 9. And so far it seems that it is able to 
>  > run at least some of my paravirtualized guests which I created on 
>  > Xen/Fedora 8.
>  >
>  > Now the problem is how I can manage these domains using virsh? I can 
>  > start a Xenner domain using "xenner (and bunch of options)". Everything 
>  > seems to be fine.
>  >
>  > But "virsh list" does not show any active domains. So how can add the  
>  > configuration to virsh so that I can do something like "virsh start 
>  > mydomain"?
>  > Is this possible at all in the current Xenner (using Fedora 9 with all  
>  > released updates but nothing from updates-testing)?
>  
>  I'm not exactly sure if support for Xenner has actually gone
>  into libvirt yet.  I know Dan is working on a patch. 
You'll need libvirt 0.4.3 to get Xenner working. You'll also need newer
virt-install (from unreleased upstream source repos) and newer virt-manager

Realistically we're looking at Fedora 10 for general availability of
Xenner support with good feature coverage & reliability.  Once it is
finished, it'll be as simple as just using --paravirt instead of --hvm
when running virt-install and it'll automatically use Xenner.

Regards,
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 :|

[Gerd Hoffmann]

Felix Schwarz wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  I got xenner to run on Fedora 9. And so far it seems that it is able to
>  run at least some of my paravirtualized guests which I created on
>  Xen/Fedora 8. 
Grab 0.37 from updates-testing, try again every guest, file bugs (or
drop me a note) if you still have guests which don't boot.

>  Now the problem is how I can manage these domains using virsh? I can
>  start a Xenner domain using "xenner (and bunch of options)". Everything
>  seems to be fine. 
>  But "virsh list" does not show any active domains. So how
> can add the
>  configuration to virsh so that I can do something like "virsh start
>  mydomain"? 
You must create a xml config file for them, look the format
documentation at libvirt.org and
/usr/share/doc/xenner-0.37/{libvirt,testinstall}.xml

It still has some rougth edges, some of them should go away with the
libvirt 0.4.3 release.

cheers,
  Gerd

-- 
http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/