Hey Alok,
The iSCSI approach you outlined seem cool to me!
The original plan for VMC was to use VirtualBox's "Supported" Python
interface but it wasn't ready in time for the initial version. So we
went with the shell interface.
Perhaps it would be valuable to investigating the current availability
and stability of the VirtualBox Python interface. Converting the the
shell scripts to the Python VirtualBox interface might be less effort
than changing implementation to iSCSI target approach.
Joe
On 06/ 3/10 04:01 PM, Dave Miner wrote:
As we discussed off-line, it seems that the amount of effort needed to
implement this may be comparable to updating the existing
implementation to deal with the VirtualBox changes over the past few
months, and it seems to insulate VMC better from churn in VB, so I'm
positive on pursuing this further.
Dave
On 05/28/10 06:13 PM, Alok Aggarwal wrote:
Currently the VM constructor part of DC uses
VirtualBox cli to construct VM images. This
is all well and good except for the fact that
the the vbox cli keeps changing rather frequently
which results in breakages such as the following -
13237 Virtual Machine Constructor doesn't support
building VM's with VirtualBox 3.1
https://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=13237
Thus, it seems prudent to investigate an alternate
way of generating VM images, one that doesn't rely
on the vbox cli's as much.
Just recently, I did some experiments where I
was able to -
a) Create a plain file and export it as an iSCSI
target
b) Install OpenSolaris into that iSCSI target
c) After the install was done, take that installed
instance encapsulated in a file and convert it
into a VDI/VMDK with vdiskadm(1M)
d) Boot a vbox instance off of a text installer
media and import the root pool contained in that
VDI/VMDK *
e) Boot another vbox instance with the resultant
VDI/VMDK
This effectively limits the use of vbox cli's
significantly, it's only needed in (d).
What do people think about re-tooling VMC to use
this approach instead?
Thanks,
Alok
(*) The installed root pool has the iSCSI device id
embedded within it. So, when it is booted under
virtual box (and it attaches to a different driver --
IDE/SCSI/SATA), the device id changes. This prevents
the machine from being booted off of that root pool.
The 'zpool import' in (d) is thus necessary to update
device id appropriately before the VM can be booted
under vbox.
_______________________________________________
caiman-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
_______________________________________________
caiman-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
_______________________________________________
caiman-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
