> I was thinking more of guests running particular services, > like Apache that > a developer may need only in a blue moon. For every > "Production" guest, we > will have an (almost) exact "Test" guest. We just don't want > to run them > all the time.
That would be a really good argument for the net-snmp based idea. You could use the SNMP OID to provide guest status for your NMS system (and have a single place to query what was running, and provide any private info you want to via a standard interface), and have a "set" request act as a virtual "power on" button -- send a set request and wait for the query interface to report "guest up", all w/o inventing a new protocol. In fact, you could implement the "set" request as a toggle, press once for on, one more time to generate the CP SIGNAL SHUTDOWN command to the guest for a graceful shutdown. -- db
