Re: [Xen-devel] [Xen-API] GSoC 2012 project brainstorming

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012, Dave Scott wrote:
> > Do you handle import as well as export? One of the more interesting use
> > cases (I think) is handling folks who want to migrate from an xm/xl
> > based setup to a xapi setup (e.g. by installing Kronos on their
> > existing
> > Debian system). That's was the primary aim of the proposed project.
> 
> IIRC it can import simple things, but it's quite incomplete. If the
> goal is to migrate from an xm/xl setup to xapi then it probably makes
> more sense to use the existing (and by definition correct) xl config
> parser and then talk the XenAPI directly. Or emit a xapi "metadata export".

Maybe we could interface XAPI with xl via JSON?
We were considering a machine readable input/output system for xl
anyway...
This way you could reuse all the existing code in xl as well as libxl
and have XAPI being a drop in addon on top of xl.
At that point xn could be the glue between xl and XAPI via JSON and
XenAPI.


> I'd also like to make the current storage plugins run standalone (currently
> they require xapi to be running). If we did that then we could potentially
> add support for XCP storage types directly into libxl (or the hotplug 
> scripts).
>
> As well as generate docs for the SMAPI I can also generate python skeleton
> code, to make it easier to write storage plugins. A custom one of these
> might make it easier to migrate from xm/xl to xapi too, by leaving the
> disks where they are, rather than moving them into a regular SR.

That would certainly make a lot of sense.
It would be great if the XCP storage plugins could be used from libxl,
so maybe XAPI could actually use libxl to setup storage too.
We are currently rewriting the interface between libxl and the hotplug
scripts, introducing the concept of a xenbackend daemon that takes care
of calling these scripts and setup the xenstore backend entries.
Alternatively this could be another place where the SM could hook into.

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