[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#783901: Bug#783901: Bug#783901: libvirt-daemon: libvirtd does not recognize Xen guests

[Gerald Turner]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

On Fri, May 08 2015, Guido Günther wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2015 at 12:51:37PM -0700, Gerald Turner wrote:
> [..snip..]
>>   * 1.2.12: Jan 27 2015
>>       libxl: Add support for parsing/formating Xen XL config (Kiarie Kahurani)
>>       Introduce support for parsing/formatting Xen xl config format (Jim Fehlig)
>
> We could cherry pick those to our stable release.

Nice!  However unless somebody else comes along and has the same
expectations that I had (i.e. libvirt recognizing Xen guests with little
or no configuration), I wouldn't put any effort into this.

>> After correcting the domain XML, and restarting libvirtd once more,
>> things start progressing:
>>
>>   # virsh -c xen:/// list --all
>>    Id    Name                           State
>>   ----------------------------------------------------
>>    -     host1                          shut off
>>
>> … however “shut off” is incorrect.
>
> Stupid question but did you start the domain via virsh beforehand? If
> so, is there anything interesting in the daemon log? AFAIK
> configurations are now managed entierly via /etc/libvirt/libxl/ .

Not stupid because that's part of the point I've subtly been trying to
make - I'm sticking with domU's started by /etc/init.d/xendomains and
/usr/sbin/xl, the "Xen way".  For four years during squeeze and wheezy,
I had dropped in munin-libvirt-plugins and libvirt-bin (0.8.3 and
0.9.12) for the sole purpose of monitoring the domU's memory/cpu/io.
This worked without any configuration other than specifying "uri
xen:///" in the munin-node plugin configuration.  During the
"heartbleed" panic, after hastily reacting to the output of
checkrestart, I accidently discovered that "service libvirt-guests
restart" actually handles restarts of these "unmanaged" domU's.
Fantastic!  Consequently I've been telling sysadmin colleagues that
libvirt is great because it integrates non-intrusively and can handle
heterogeneous VM environments.

Sorry - I was too quick to react after upgrading to jessie and opening
this bug.  FWICT libvirt+Xen/xl no longer supports this "unmanaged"
use-case like the way libvirt+Xen/xend was able to in previous releases.
In the meantime I've dropped in a non-Debian-packaged Xen munin plugin¹
and have stopped relying on libvirt.

Perhaps one day I'll experiment with a managed libvirt+Xen setup on a
non-Production system and report some real bugs ;-)

¹ http://munin-monitoring.org/browser/munin-contrib/plugins/virtualization/xen-multi

-- 
Gerald Turner <gturner at unzane.com>        Encrypted mail preferred!
OpenPGP: 4096R / CA89 B27A 30FA 66C5 1B80  3858 EC94 2276 FDB8 716D
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