Re: Administration panel for KVM

[Matthias Hovestadt <matthias.hovestadt@tu-berlin.de>]

Hi!

> 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.


Regards,
Matthias