KVM roll revamped

[lclementi]

What is needed?

KVM rocks commands

• add support for pinning cpus (cpus topology)
• DONE add support for specifying cpus models
• add support for adding host devices to VM (pci, usb, etc)
• add support to add CDrom images (should be supported by pilot)
• add support to specify boot order (should be supported by pilot) (we can do that through console for the moment)

Pilot (Airboss)

• currently pilot requires user account on the frontend for SSH redirection (this should be removed, easy)
• add support to use FE FQDN (instead of mac address)
• add support for vncviewer (currently support only tightvncviwer)
• it should allow users to add a CDrom images
• add support for scripting disk path and cpu pinning
• add support to use node names (currently it supports only mac addresses to identify the nodes) (low priority)
• it should allow users to change boot order (low priority, they can use the console for that)

Implementation details

• Cpu pinning: we will use attribute to specify cpu pinning
  • pro:
    • they already support hierarchies (global, host, appliance, etc)
    • very fast to implement
    • very flexible (can cover all corner cases)
  • cons:
    • user must enter most of the xml in the attribute
    • very low level
• host devices: multiple attributes can be used to specify the various devices
  • Pro Cons are the same as in the previous case
• add scripting support for cpu pinning though attribute. Users can specify a path to a script that will be invoked every time the VM starts and stops. The script will output XML relative to the disks or to the cpu pinning information
• add scripting support for disks definition in a VM, user can specify a path to a script which is called when the VM start and stops (use current table vm_disks)
• CD ROM: use database vm_disk table. In this case we don't really need to have all the grouping capabilities
• boot order: still undecided

@ppapadopoulos

[lclementi]

All issues have been addressed in the current release of KVM.
And they will be part of rocks 6.2.

Clem