Re: What administrative user interfaces for Xen are available for NetBSD?

[Pierre-Philipp Braun <pbraun%nethence.com@localhost>]

> since I set up my lab environment on NetBSD/Xen I am very satisfied with 
> the handling of Xen. I use a mixture of sparse image files and LVM 
> volumes as storage. The guests are mostly NetBSD (PVM) and some Windows 
> 7 VMs. Apart from snapshots (which I would probably get if I switched to 
> ZFS volumes) I don't really miss anything and am also satisfied with the 
> performance.

LVM also has some thin-provisioning and snapshot feature, although I am 
not sure NetBSD has it.  Also I heard we can now use sparse files, which 
was not the case before.

> But what I am asking myself right now... is there a higher 
> administration interface besides the command line tools (xl)? Libvirt is 
> supposed to support Xen (I don't know about nvmm?), but there should be 
> some kind of user interface on top of it. If someone has experience with 
> this or knows a halfway recommendable configuration on a NetBSD Dom0, I 
> would be grateful for a little tip. In the pkgsrc I did not find 
> anything obvious in this regard.

You don't really need any user interface while taking advantage of 
guests in PV and PVH modes, as you can reach their console right there 
from the terminal, and for some, it's the beauty of it.  It's only nice 
to have a GUI to deal with the VNC or Spice consoles of HVM or PVHVM 
guests, but even then, one could setup the guests to spit on the serial 
console.

What you're probably looking for are virt-manager, virt-viewer which 
depend on libvirt indeed.  There's also the virt-install command line 
script.  But it can be considered a benefit not to depend on libvirt 
altogether.  The XEN Light toolkit tools are good enough for handling 
XEN virtualization, while it's really hard with KVM without libvirt. 
Anyhow this won't really compete with VirtualBox nor desktop-oriented 
virtualization engines.  It's just another kind of product and use-case. 
 XEN and KVM are rather targeting virtualization farms and there, some 
cloud engine to distribute the load automatically matters more than an 
admin UI.  There is some hype on XCP-NG but this goes with XenServer, 
which is now Open Source, but it's different from the community XEN we 
have.  To (automatically) manage a farm community XEN dom0, be it Linux 
or NetBSD powered, I would personally consider Ganeti.  I tried 
OpenStack once and it was a total nightmare.

Pierre-Philipp