Caseless virtualization cluster: remote libvirt

Now to the question of how to manage the VMs on my virtualization cluster.

I don’t have a good answer yet, but two things are true:

1. libvirt will be used to manage the VMs
2. ssh is used for remote logins

It’s simple to set up ssh to allow remote logins as root using ssh-agent:

ham3$ sudo bash
ham3# cd /root
ham3# mkdir .ssh
ham3# cp /mnt/scratch/authorized_keys .ssh/

From a remote host, remote virsh commands now work:

$ virsh -c qemu+ssh://root@ham3/system list
 Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------

Using libvirt URI aliases (thanks Kashyap) I can set up some aliases to make this quite easy:

$ cat .config/libvirt/libvirt.conf
uri_aliases = [
  "ham0=qemu+ssh://root@ham0/system",
  "ham1=qemu+ssh://root@ham1/system",
  "ham2=qemu+ssh://root@ham2/system",
  "ham3=qemu+ssh://root@ham3/system",
]
$ virsh -c ham0 list
 Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------

However my bash history contains a lot of commands like these which don’t make me happy:

$ for i in 0 1 2 3 ; do ./bin/wol-ham$i; done
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 ; do virsh -c ham$i list; done