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• Launchpad Entry: hardyvirtualisationhost

• Packages affected:

Summary

For the Hardy Heron release we'll be focusing on kvm as the virtualisation technique and be using libvirt, virt-manager, and friends as the management stack.

Release Note

Ubuntu Server takes another step into the world of virtualisation. This release of Ubuntu features kvm as a first class virtualisation technology and a set of graphical and command line tools to manage your virtual machines.

Rationale

Virtualisation is A Big Thing[tm]. We need to be part of the game.

Use Cases

Assumptions

Design

We've decided to settle on kvm for our primary virtualisation host technology for several reasons:

• Active upstream
• Good performance
• Kernel support in the mainline kernel
• etc.

For management, we'll use libvirt, virt-manager, virtinst, and virt-viewer. These tools provide both a graphical interface for managing Xen, kvm, qemu, and qemu+kqemu based vm's.

Special consideration should be taken to provide remote desktop services and remote network connections to the virtual host server.

As these technologies are also supported by the management tools, it would be nice to have them in good shape as well, but that will not be considered critical for the success of this spec.

Implementation

We'll be tracking upstream kvm releases closely and be sure to report issues back to them.

We'll ASAP get virt-manager and friends uploaded to the archive, so that we can start testing things as early as possible.

A task will be added that installs kvm and possibly the management tools

UI Changes

Code Changes

Migration

It would be a good bonus if there was an easy way to import existing virtual machines into the libvirt stack, but it's not critical.

Test/Demo Plan

TBD

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Outstanding Issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

CategorySpec