Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt list.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
Virtualization Test Day
Mark McLoughlin announced[1] that Fedora 11 "Test Day"[2] for virtualization is this week on Thursday May 7th. "On the day, you'll have the opportunity to work closely with other Fedora developers and contributors to make a real impact on the quality of Fedora's virtualization features."
"The wiki page[3] contains a first cut at listing test areas which we will cover on the day. Each test area will have a set of test cases. We plan to flesh out these test cases as part of the test day, but if people could dive in now and start writing some test cases, that would make a huge difference."
New Release libguestfs 1.0.15
Richard Jones
announced[1]
"version 1.0.15 of
, the library for
accessing and modifying virtual machine filesystems."
libguestfs
New Features:
- New
virt-inspector
[2] tool.
- This can tell you at a high level what is on a virtual machine, such as how its filesystems are mounted, what OS and version it is running, what kernel, drivers and apps are installed.
- New 'lvremove', 'vgremove', 'pvremove' commands.
- Add really working support for NTFS and FAT.
- Add really working support for CD-ROMs and DVDs.
- Add
--ro
option for read-only mounts in guestfish. - New 'set-e2uuid', 'get-e2uuid', 'set-e2label', 'get-e2label' commands for setting ext2/3/4 UUIDs and labels.
- New 'debug' command for debugging daemon internals.
- Guestfish recipes.
- Many bugs fixed (note: including a data corruptor that affected FileOut transfers, so upgrading is recommended).
Version 1.0.10 was announced just last week (FWN#173[3]). Also see Richard's many blog posts
[4] on libguestfs
.
Install Grub Bootloader on Converted Virtual Images
Dennis J. was "experimenting[1] with converting a physical system to a virtual one" and "was able to transfer the system to a volume group in an image file. My problem is that I don't know how to install grub on that image file."
Richard Jones
asked "Why not just copy across the whole block device? This is essentially
what virt-p2v
[2] does, although virt-p2v
is doing nothing more than automating what you could do by hand."
Richard then quickly added a grub-install
feature
to libguestfs
[3],
and demonstrated[4]
how to use it.
Richard noted[5] the minimum target is Fedora 11.
"There's no chance of libguestfs
for Fedora 10, because the qemu
maintainers aren't interested in pulling back vmchannel support into
that old qemu 0.9 package in F-10."
Virt-Manage an Existing Guest
Tom London
asked[1] about bringing an existing guest under management by
. One option is to use virt-manager
virt-install
to create a similar guest then export and modify the XML definition of that guest and 'virsh define
' it.
Daniel Berrange
provided another method by posting[2]
a perl script that can be used to create an XML definition from the set of
qemu-kvm
command line arguments used to create the guest.