Scope
This contains a "framework" I have written around virsh for controlling KVM machines and setups more easily. More easily here focuses on two objectives:
- Become able to start and stop everything at boot time. While a shutdown is rather uninteresting in terms of dependencies and whatnot and libvirt-guests can take this over, a boot out of the blue and in proper order is something I wanted to take into my own hands
- Integration into systemd. More dependencies, groups of units, ... and isn't it nice to see every more important KVM yoke report itself at boot time? (Yes, I have a more verbose boot; a black screen followed by a prompt is for the Windows/Apple generation.)
- Finally, with 1. and 2.: you need to do things on your own from here. I heavily use virsh, but I wrap around that, because if I shutdown a machine that is already shutdown for whatever reason, I would not consider the systemd unit's shutdown to be failed, virsh does.
- Automation. See what you automate, but don't care anymore :) This point is actually a summary of all of the above.
To-Do
- [ ] Create a configuration file /etc/kvmheklper.conf and an update script that will place the respective systemd units inside /etc/systemd for you
- [ ] Make the systemd service and target units mroe abstract, i.e. it should really not have any names anymore and reflect the 4 layer principle only
Content
The directories etc/systemd/system, etc/tmpfiles.d, and usr/local/[s]bin should be self-explanatory. Therein, you'll find the following:
Systemd units
- kvm-SOMETHING@.service: Designed to control machines or networks. I view my setups basically as a compound of four layers: Network, network VMs like routing/firewall/managed switching, infrastructural machines such as an iscsi provider, and then the slave-only machines. This more or less is reflected in what is pushed in this repository and will improve in the near future (more abstraction, more generalisms, better layer steering).
- cluster-SOMETHING.target: Basically just an example. I have three slave only machines forming a PCS (corosync/pacemaker) cluster, so I put them in there to have them boot parallelly.
Scripts
- kvmhelper: The actual script administering the environment through virsh. It can be entirely quiet (but isn't by default, it also tells you if it's successful)), and it will also terminate successfully if you try to start something that is already up or try to kill something that is already down.