KVM and VMport, or r76 UUID functionality

KVM and VMport, or r76 UUID functionality

[Bryan McLellan]

I'm trying to associate KVM hosts and guests programmatically in a
production environment. With VMWare-Server I had passed a variable
(hostname of host) through the backdoor using the vmware-cmd and
vmware-server binaries. Currently I'm on r62 (Ubuntu package). Is/was
the VMport code before r76 functional? Is anyone able to specify what
it did emulate such that I could use it for a similar purpose?

Or do I need to look for support in libvirt for the changes in r76
that allow passing the UUID of the guest into the SMBIOS information
via the command line, and start working with those?

Bryan McLellan
[not subscribed]

Re: KVM and VMport, or r76 UUID functionality

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:06:30AM -0700, Bryan McLellan wrote:
> I'm trying to associate KVM hosts and guests programmatically in a
> production environment. With VMWare-Server I had passed a variable
> (hostname of host) through the backdoor using the vmware-cmd and
> vmware-server binaries. Currently I'm on r62 (Ubuntu package). Is/was
> the VMport code before r76 functional? Is anyone able to specify what
> it did emulate such that I could use it for a similar purpose?
> 
> Or do I need to look for support in libvirt for the changes in r76
> that allow passing the UUID of the guest into the SMBIOS information
> via the command line, and start working with those?

Does the latest released kvm finally support the --uuid arg ? If so we'll
happily make use of it in libvirt - its very little work to add it. We've
just been waiting for it to make it into official released versions, so
we don't rely on something that may still have been changing.

Daniel
-- 
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Re: KVM and VMport, or r76 UUID functionality

[Bryan McLellan]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Daniel P. Berrange
<berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:06:30AM -0700, Bryan McLellan wrote:
>> I'm trying to associate KVM hosts and guests programmatically in a
>> production environment. With VMWare-Server I had passed a variable
>> (hostname of host) through the backdoor using the vmware-cmd and
>> vmware-server binaries. Currently I'm on r62 (Ubuntu package). Is/was
>> the VMport code before r76 functional? Is anyone able to specify what
>> it did emulate such that I could use it for a similar purpose?
>>
>> Or do I need to look for support in libvirt for the changes in r76
>> that allow passing the UUID of the guest into the SMBIOS information
>> via the command line, and start working with those?
>
> Does the latest released kvm finally support the --uuid arg ? If so we'll
> happily make use of it in libvirt - its very little work to add it. We've
> just been waiting for it to make it into official released versions, so
> we don't rely on something that may still have been changing.

'-uuid' is in kvm-77. You can verify the uuid with 'info uuid' on in
the qemu monitor.

The BIOS modifications did not make it in KVM (1a3329) until 78RC1. I
suspect we won't see accurate data in the UUID field until then. I
haven't tested 78RC1, but the SMBIOS information returned by dmidecode
in 77 does not show the correct UUID.

Bryan