Removal of Export Storage Domain and virt-v2v
As you may know virt-v2v can use the Export Storage Domain (ESD) to upload converted virtual machines to oVirt. It was brought to my attention yesterday that the ESD feature is being dropped, so this will no longer work at some point in the future. (BTW I would appreciate notice if you're going to drop major features that we rely on.) Although virt-v2v can still work via the GUI, this isn't really suitable for bulk, scripted upload of hundreds or thousands of VMs. The ESD method was never very good. It was sort of an undocumented back door into oVirt, and it was slow, and still required manual intervention (after virt-v2v had done its job, you still needed to go through the GUI and import the guests into the Data Domain). What we really need is a fully scripted method to upload VMs -- metadata and disk images -- to oVirt. Maybe one exists already? If not, what's the best way to do this? Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:04 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
As you may know virt-v2v can use the Export Storage Domain (ESD) to upload converted virtual machines to oVirt. It was brought to my attention yesterday that the ESD feature is being dropped, so this will no longer work at some point in the future. (BTW I would appreciate notice if you're going to drop major features that we rely on.)
We are not dropping it tomorrow. We are slowly deprecating it.
Although virt-v2v can still work via the GUI, this isn't really suitable for bulk, scripted upload of hundreds or thousands of VMs.
The ESD method was never very good. It was sort of an undocumented back door into oVirt, and it was slow, and still required manual intervention (after virt-v2v had done its job, you still needed to go through the GUI and import the guests into the Data Domain).
What we really need is a fully scripted method to upload VMs -- metadata and disk images -- to oVirt. Maybe one exists already? If not, what's the best way to do this?
And indeed, we won't deprecate it without a suitable replacement. While you can already upload disks, we are working towards upload/download of VMs. See http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import... Y.
Rich.
-- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~ rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:04 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
As you may know virt-v2v can use the Export Storage Domain (ESD) to upload converted virtual machines to oVirt. It was brought to my attention yesterday that the ESD feature is being dropped, so this will no longer work at some point in the future. (BTW I would appreciate notice if you're going to drop major features that we rely on.)
It caught me by surprise as well while discussing [1]. Allon, has it been shared publicly? if not, can we publicly discuss the high level design and goals of this effort?
Although virt-v2v can still work via the GUI, this isn't really suitable for bulk, scripted upload of hundreds or thousands of VMs.
We now enable triggering that process also via REST-API (this is mostly intended for importing from VMware using ManageIQ, which is expected to be available soon).
The ESD method was never very good. It was sort of an undocumented back door into oVirt, and it was slow, and still required manual intervention (after virt-v2v had done its job, you still needed to go through the GUI and import the guests into the Data Domain).
What we really need is a fully scripted method to upload VMs -- metadata and disk images -- to oVirt. Maybe one exists already? If not, what's the best way to do this?
So besides using the REST-API mentioned above, we may be able to deliver some of the stuff described in [1] before dropping the export domain. With that, we can think of generating an oVirt-compatible OVA as an output of virt-v2v that can be consumed in a similar way to how VMs in the export domain used to be consumed. Other than that, there is a rumor about introucing a backup-data-domain. Hopefully, that plan will also be shared publicly and we'll know more details about it. If it will be close in concept to the export domain, we may be able to replace the export domain with that domain in virt-v2v. [1] http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import...
Rich.
-- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~ rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org
Yaniv wrote:
And indeed, we won't deprecate it without a suitable replacement. While you can already upload disks, we are working towards upload/download of VMs. See http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import...
My concern with this (if I've understood it correctly) is it's going to be slow and require considerable extra storage on the conversion server. At the moment -- using NFS -- we can stream from VMware to oVirt, requiring almost no local storage on the conversion server. On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 03:30:12PM +0300, Arik Hadas wrote:
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:04 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
Although virt-v2v can still work via the GUI, this isn't really suitable for bulk, scripted upload of hundreds or thousands of VMs.
We now enable triggering that process also via REST-API (this is mostly intended for importing from VMware using ManageIQ, which is expected to be available soon).
That requires virt-v2v to be installed on the oVirt nodes so it's not quite a replacement for what you can do with ‘virt-v2v -o rhv’ today. Can we have a REST API so that we can upload the disk images and OVF metadata to some directory on the NFS server (eg. an ‘/import’ directory), and then the call the REST API which would complete the import -- ie. update the database, and move the images to their final places (bonus points if it can handle chown-ing the images too).
Other than that, there is a rumor about introucing a backup-data-domain. Hopefully, that plan will also be shared publicly and we'll know more details about it. If it will be close in concept to the export domain, we may be able to replace the export domain with that domain in virt-v2v.
Any more details of this? Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 02:52:56PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
Yaniv wrote:
And indeed, we won't deprecate it without a suitable replacement. While you can already upload disks, we are working towards upload/download of VMs. See http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import...
My concern with this (if I've understood it correctly) is it's going to be slow and require considerable extra storage on the conversion server.
At the moment -- using NFS -- we can stream from VMware to oVirt, requiring almost no local storage on the conversion server.
Thinking about this overnight, another way to do this would be to allow the import of "OVA directories". OVA doesn't need to be packed into a tarball, the standard allows an OVA to be an unpacked directory (directory containing disk images + OVF file). Create a ‘/import’ directory on the NFS server, and allow OVA directories to be uploaded to there. We could stream the disk content as now. Then provide a REST API to import an OVA (directory) from /import on the NFS server to complete to operation. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
participants (3)
-
Arik Hadas -
Richard W.M. Jones -
Yaniv Kaul