Re: [Kimchi-devel] [RFC] Guest cloning

I'm guessing that Brent and Adam already discussed virt-clone, so I'm curious as to the reasons why that's not an option. I've found that virt-install (the package that includes it) has (on Fedora 20) a dependency on virt-manager-common. That, and maybe it's not available for all distros? Maybe it wouldn't copy disks into the right places?

Thanks, - Christy On 10/06/2014 08:28 AM, Crístian Viana wrote: > On Sex, 2014-10-03 at 08:28 -0500, Brent Baude wrote: >> At one point Adam had really suggested we look at how guests are defined >> and changed. In particular, straight copies of XML and or straight >> edits of XML could lead (after time) to the XML digressing into >> something libvirt might not understand at some point. > Do you remember exactly what in the XML file digressed like that? It > would be very nice to know it. > >> To prevent this sort of problem, we thought that each time a guest is >> edited, the XML is created entirely anew but of course using the same >> values. > I first thought about doing that as well, but I'm afraid our own new XML > does not have all the features the original VM had. For example, on > Kimchi we don't have support to custom CPU flags yet (i.e. we don't > add/change those values). What would happen if we clone an existing VM > with "unsupported" (as of Kimchi) features like that one? If we don't > know about them and we're creating a new XML from scratch, we're only > going to add what we're aware of. And I think this could make our > cloning feature very unrealiable. Reading an existing XML and redefining > it will always propagate whatever there is in that VM. As long as the > XML doesn't get digressed, of course. > > Here's one current scenario for me. I have a few VMs on my laptop which > I use to test Kimchi on them. As they need to be a hypervisor in order > to run Kimchi, I have to add a few CPU flags to their XML descriptors > which allow them to be a hypervisor (i.e. those Intel/AMD virtualization > parameters). I do that manually using "virsh edit". If I clone one of my > VMs using the approach above and it recreates their XML files from the > beginning, AFAIU, the CPU flags will not be copied along. And I'd be > very unsatisfied because the clone feature dropped a few things of my > original VM while cloning. > > If we know what are the problems you had with Adam while copying the XML > files over and over, maybe it' easier to fix them than to try to create > a new one with all the libvirt's features, including the ones Kimchi is > still not aware of. > >> About a month ago I had a working version of this in draft >> form. >> Would anyone be interested in reviewing it and or adding to it prior to >> implementing the clone function? If so, ping me on IRC and I'll get you >> a copy of the patch. > I am interested on it! I'll ping you then. > _______________________________________________ Kimchi-devel mailing list Kimchi-devel(a)ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/kimchi-devel