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Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

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Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#91

Post by guerby »

RedShift1 wrote: post #82
guerby wrote: post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

What software do you use to back up the virtual machines?

We're currently trying to replace our proprietary backup software by using libvirt snapshot-create-as/blockcommit and borgbackup on raw image.

  virsh snapshot-create-as ... --disk-only
  borg create .... vmimage.raw
  virsh blockcommit ... --active --pivot
borgbackup does compression and deduplication and has a simple command line and excellent documentation (and IRC channel :).

https://www.borgbackup.org/

guestfish/libguestfs is then used if you need specific files within an image instead of a complete restore.

https://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html

Example dump the name of all files on all filesystems:

   guestfish --ro -i -a vmimage.raw find /
Can be used to check integrity post backup too, and may be we'll add some file indexing tools.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#92

Post by cpsaltis »

wazoox wrote: post #83
cpsaltis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with virt-manager is that it's a desktop application and you can't really collaborate with others when managing infrastructure. Cockpit solves this issue. The feature set in slightly different but mainly it is limited as to what you can manage. When running different types of infrastructure at the same time, e.g. KVM + AWS + Azure + ... it won't help much. In such cases it would make sense to check out…

Virt-manager can connect simultaneously from many different terminals to many different libvirt servers. What do you mean by "you can't collaborate with others"?

I mean that you can't really have multiple people, from multiple teams, accessing the same infra with different types of rights and with centrally managed authentication/authorization/logging.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#93

Post by servilio »

guerby wrote: post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

> RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager

For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#94

Post by yrro »

servilio wrote: post #93
guerby wrote: post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

> RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

Phew!

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#95

Post by lights0123 »

ohazi wrote: post #27

If you haven't tried it, the "Virtual Machine Manager" GUI [1] is also surprisingly usable on Desktop Linux. I use it with both Windows and Linux images, and getting it to work with the usual guest extension niceties is straightforward. From what I remember, getting VirtualBox or VMware to launch and run properly after a few months of automatic upgrades and not launching your images for a while was always kind of a g…

For simple usage, GNOME Boxes is really nice. It'll automatically download the ISOs of basically any Linux distro when you click on their logo, automatically go through the installer, and install copy/paste, dynamic resizing of the VM screen when you resize the window (I don't believe virt-manager supports that), and drag/drop support. It uses libvirt behind the scenes, so you can use virt-manager with VMs created by Boxes and vice versa.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#96

Post by formerly_proven »

dijit wrote: post #90
formerly_proven wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has to be a recent change, because editing the XML used to cause it to roundtrip through libvirt, which doesn't keep the XML DOM around; anything not in the internal C structs would be removed from the files, including all comments.

I’m not sure fully how it works internally I’m afraid. But I was doing this in 2013-2014 if that’s any indicator of timeframe.

Weird, I've done it quite recently on a Debian system and it reformatted & removed everything it doesn't know from the XML. If you Google this, it's a common issue and apparently the reason why the top-level "metadata" tag was added, because that metadata-tag is carried around as DOM, so doesn't get purged.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#97

Post by ghostpepper »

snicker7 wrote: post #80
guerby wrote: post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

One thing to note is that Cockpit is very tied to systemd. Doesn't work with alt inits.

Can you elaborate on this? Does cockpit include a handful of services/sockets that must be activated in sequence? Or does it rely on other parts of the systemd constellation

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#98

Post by simcop2387 »

cpsaltis wrote: post #92
wazoox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virt-manager can connect simultaneously from many different terminals to many different libvirt servers. What do you mean by "you can't collaborate with others"?

I mean that you can't really have multiple people, from multiple teams, accessing the same infra with different types of rights and with centrally managed authentication/authorization/logging.

That's exactly what libvirt lets you do. It uses policykit to handle the authorization, cockpit doesn't change that and still requires you to use policykit to control who has access to what.

https://libvirt.org/aclpolkit.html

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#99

Post by ohazi »

lights0123 wrote: post #95
ohazi wrote: post #27

If you haven't tried it, the "Virtual Machine Manager" GUI [1] is also surprisingly usable on Desktop Linux. I use it with both Windows and Linux images, and getting it to work with the usual guest extension niceties is straightforward. From what I remember, getting VirtualBox or VMware to launch and run properly after a few months of automatic upgrades and not launching your images for a while was always kind of a g…

For simple usage, GNOME Boxes is really nice. It'll automatically download the ISOs of basically any Linux distro when you click on their logo, automatically go through the installer, and install copy/paste, dynamic resizing of the VM screen when you resize the window (I don't believe virt-manager supports that), and drag/drop support. It uses libvirt behind the scenes, so you can use virt-manager with VMs created by…

I don't think I ever tried drag and drop, but I've gotten copy/paste and window->display resizing to work in virt-manager after manually setting up the kvm/qemu guest tools.
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