Hey gang: A little background is in order here: I've just finished my Masters Degree in MIS, and have used VBox for homework and other projects for years. One of my research interests is with BDIM (Business Driven IT Management)
BDIM is too much to explain here, but suffice it to say that its a situation where in a controlled environment the IT system can manage itself and shrink and grow its own capacity as business needs demand. With a little creative thinking and use of existing tools VBox already supports half of what I will call a "Poor Man's BDIM" VBoxManage is an amazing tool with lots of features that would come in handy for BDIM support. The controlvm set of commands that can manage a running vm with the help of guest additions is a start along with the ability to script VBoxManage in general to start vms, and manage the networking. Here is my problem. True BDIM support needs the guest to talk to the host in addition to the host talking to the guest. Say I have a web server running inside a vm container. When my seasonal demand begins to peak, I need a monitoring script for my web server that can sense the increased demand (easily enough done) and if demand is high enough, it should send a command to the host to fire up the spare web server guest and add it to the load balance pool. Right now there is no way for the guest to talk to the host in the way that would be required. HP is spending a TON of money on fancy hardware to support just this type of work, but I see a market for this same support in smaller companies that can not afford the fancy hardware that HP is building. I know what I'm asking is generally hard and depends in large degree on the current structure of things VBox. I want to know if supporting something like this is even feasible, and how this could be done? I have an idea, but someone inside the VBox project needs to vet this. Here we go: VBox already supports serial ports in the guest. Create an application that is part of VBox software on the host that listens to serial port connections from guests that have been started with a special setting requesting this service. Using software already available for the guest, python/perl scripts can connect to the serial port inside the guest and send messages to the process running on the host machine. One of the options needs to be to allow the guest to request that commands/scripts, etc be run on the host box. So I put it to the community: What do you guys think? Is this something that would work for you? I'm willing to discuss alternative implementation ideas if the basic idea has merit but the serial support idea does not work, maybe something like a virtual "Integrated Lights-Out" Thanks for your time. Rance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev _______________________________________________ VBox-users-community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community
