Re: Administration panel for KVM

[Daniel Bareiro <daniel-listas@gmx.net>]

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On Sunday, 10 April 2011 14:00:41 +0200,
Matthias Hovestadt wrote:

> Hi!

Hi, Matthias!

> > With a group of college buddies, we are evaluating the possibility of
> > initiating a project to develop a management panel of KVM virtual
> > machines. The idea is to do something similar to OpenXenManager but for
> > KVM.

> At out university we developed a Perl-based management tool named
> "kvm-top". This tool is command-line only, not offering any GUI at
> the moment. The initial idea of that tool was to make the start-up of
> VMs easier than doing it manually. The tool analyzes a VM-specific
> config file like
> 
> GUEST_ID=219
> GUEST_NAME=attic
> .
> .
> 
> defining all parameters for starting up a VM. For actually starting
> this VM, a single command now is sufficient:
> 
> asok01 ~ # kvm-top -start attic
> 
> This will not only start-up the VM "attic", but also check if this VM
> is running on some other cluster node and connect to the iSCSI target
> if required.
> 
> Meanwhile, the tool has evolved, not only consisting of the "kvm-top"
> tool, but also a server component named "kvm-ctld" running on each
> cluster node. The "kvm-top" tool connects to the "kvm-ctld" running
> on the local host, executing the desired command. At this, the
> command does not nessecarily have to be executed on the same cluster
> node. For instance, it is easily possible to start/stop a VM running
> on a different cluster node.
> 
> 
> However, the main feature of "kvm-top" is giving information about
> the current status of the running VMs:
> 
> asok01 ~ # kvm-top
> VM           NODE   AS 5s  30s USER PID   #CPU MEM   VNC   SPICE #LAN
> =====================================================================
> attic        asok02      4   4 root  6614    1  2048 36003     -    2
> cbase        asok08      1   1 root 10222    1  1048 36142     -    1
> cbase-spice  asok08      0   0 root  4269    1  1024 36143  5924    1
> cloud-pj     asok02     14  18 root 24071    1  1024 36001     -    2
> .
> .
> .
> 
> where "5s" and "30s" contain the average system load over the last
> 5s resp. 30s. There are serveral ways of filtering or sorting the
> output, e.g. sorting by cluster nodes:
> 
> asok01 ~ # kvm-top -s node
> NODE   VM           AS 5s  30s USER PID   #CPU MEM   VNC   SPICE #LAN
> =====================================================================
> asok01(ENABLED): 0(0) VMs, CPU=0%, MEM=2%, AGE 00:00
> asok02(ENABLED): 7(8) VMs, CPU=13%, MEM=99%, AGE 00:05
>        attic             4   4 root  6614    1  2048 36003     -    2
>        cloud-pj         21  19 root 24071    1  1024 36001     -    2
> .
> .
> 
> 
> The "kvm-top" tool even allows migration of VMs between the cluster
> nodes. The following command would migrate the VM "attic" from the
> currently used cluster node "asok02" to cluster node "asok07" (note:
> the command has been executed on a different cluster node "asok01"):
> 
> asok01 ~ # kvm-top -migrate attic asok07
> 
> 
> As I mentioned, the tool is command line only at the moment, however it
> shouldn't be too difficult to create a web-based interface, since the
> kvm-ctld allows communication not only with kvm-top. Connecting to the
> port of kvm-ctld, it's pretty easy to get information about all
> currently running VMs or start/stop/migrate VMs.
> 
> 
> If there's interest in that tool, please let me know. I'll gladly
> publish it.

Sounds interesting. If you publish it, I'd take a look.

Researching on the Internet I found virt-manager [1], although I'm not
sure if it can interact with KVM. In any case, virt-manager uses libvirt
and my idea was not to use libvirt in the VMHost. I guess "kvm-ctld"
will supply some of the functions of libvirt at the remote end.

Thanks for your reply.

Regards,
Daniel

[1] http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/
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