Oz 0.13.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.13.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.13.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.12.0 and 0.13.0 are:

• For Fedora, if the user specifies a version, but that isn't supported yet, try the last supported version (in this case), as that will often work.
• Fix a regression where we forgot to force the qcow2 image type
• Allow installs that use more than one installation device
• Add support for RHEL 6.5
• Rename OEL-6 to OL-6
• Add support for Ubuntu 14.04
• Add Windows 8.1 support
• Add CentOS-7 support
• Add the ability to specify kernel parameters in the TDL
• Make sure to remove dhcp leases from guests after the install
• Fix support for FreeBSD
• Add in support for TDL "precommands"; these are commands that are run *before* package installation
• Fix up file locking
• Add support for RHEL 5.11
• Remove Ubuntu ssh keys at the end of installation
• Add support for Ubuntu 14.10
• Add support for XInclude, for merging various TDLs together
• Add Fedora 21 support
• Add support for ppc64 and ppc64le

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-20, Fedora-21, Fedora-22, EPEL-6, and EPEL-7 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki. If you have questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact me at clalancette at gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Release of ruby-libvirt 0.5.2

This is a release notification for ruby-libvirt 0.5.2. ruby-libvirt is a ruby wrapper around the libvirt API. The changelog between 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 is:

• Fix to make sure we don't free more entries than retrieved (potential crash)

Version 0.5.2 is available from http://libvirt.org/ruby:

Tarball: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.2.tgz
Gem: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.2.gem

It is also available from rubygems.org; to get the latest version, run:

$ gem install ruby-libvirt

As usual, if you run into questions, problems, or bugs, please feel free to mail me (clalancette@gmail com) and the libvirt mailing list.

Thanks to Guido Günther for the patch to fix this problem.

Oz 0.12.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.12.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.12.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.11.0 and 0.12.0 are:

• Fixes to concurrent oz-install invocations
• Python 3 compatibility in the test suites
• Support for Ubuntu 12.04.3
• Support for Mageia
• Allow a MAC address to be passed in (instead of auto-generated)
• Support for RHEL5.10
• Support for Ubuntu 13.10
• Use lxml instead of libxml2 for XML document processing (it has much better error messages)
• Remove the unused "tunnels" functionality
• Support FreeBSD 10.0
• Remove deprecated functions from the Guest class
• Speed up guest customization on guests that support NetworkManager
• Follow subprocess commands as they are executed (makes debugging easier)
• Ensure that any paths from the user are absolute, otherwise things don't work properly
• Add support for OpenSUSE 13.1
• Add support for Fedora 20
• Add support for RHEL-7

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-19, Fedora-20, and EPEL-6 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki. If you have questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact me at clalancette at gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Release of ruby-libvirt 0.5.1

I'm pleased to announce the release of ruby-libvirt 0.5.1. ruby-libvirt is a ruby wrapper around the libvirt API. The changelog between 0.5.0 and 0.5.1 is:

• Fixes to compile against older libvirt
• Fixes to compile against ruby 1.8

Version 0.5.1 is available from http://libvirt.org/ruby: Tarball: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.1.tgz Gem: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.1.gem It is also available from rubygems.org; to get the latest version, run: $ gem install ruby-libvirt As usual, if you run into questions, problems, or bugs, please feel free to mail me (clalancette@gmail.com) and/or the libvirt mailing list. Thanks to everyone who contributed patches and submitted bugs.

Release of ruby-libvirt 0.5.0

I'm pleased to announce the release of ruby-libvirt 0.5.0. ruby-libvirt is a ruby wrapper around the libvirt API. Version 0.5.0 brings new APIs, more documentation, and bugfixes:

• Updated Network class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Updated Domain class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Updated Connection class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Updated DomainSnapshot class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Updated NodeDevice class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Updated Storage class, implementing almost all libvirt APIs
• Add constants for almost all libvirt defines
• Improved performance in the library by using alloca

Version 0.5.0 is available from http://libvirt.org/ruby: Tarball: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.0.tgz Gem: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.5.0.gem It is also available from rubygems.org; to get the latest version, run: $ gem install ruby-libvirt As usual, if you run into questions, problems, or bugs, please feel free to mail me (clalancette@gmail.com) and/or the libvirt mailing list. Thanks to everyone who contributed patches and submitted bugs.

Oz 0.11.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.11.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.11.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.10.0 and 0.11.0 are:

• Add support for installing Ubuntu 13.04
• Add the ability to get user-specific ICICLE information
• Add the ability to generate ICICLE safely, by using a disk snapshot
• Add the ability to include extra files and directories on the installation ISO
• Add the ability to install to alternate file types, like qcow2, etc.
• Add support for installing Ubuntu 5.04/5.10
• Add support for installing Fedora 19
• Add support for installing Debian 7
• Add support for Windows 2012 and 8
• Add support for getting files over http for the commands/files section of the TDL
• Add support for setting a custom MAC address to guests during installation
• Add support for user specified disk and NIC model
• Add support for OpenSUSE 12.3
• Add support for URL based installs for Ubuntu

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-18 and Fedora-19 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki.

If you have questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact me at clalancette at gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues.

This was one of the most active Oz releases ever, because of the feedback and patches from the community. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Oz 0.10.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.10.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.10.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.9.0 and 0.10.0 are:

• Support for installing OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.2
• Support for python3
• Support for Ubuntu 12.04.1, 12.04.2, and 12.10
• Fix up ordering so that commands are run in the order they are specified in the XML
• Updates and fixes to the documentation
• Increase the shutdown timeout to support slower qemu guests
• Add a default screenshot directory as /var/lib/oz/screenshots
• Support for RHEL 5.9
• Support for Fedora 18
• Switch over to pycurl for header information; this allows http authentication to work
• Switch to using the libvirt built-in screenshot mechanism. This removes the gvnc dependency and makes screenshots more reliable, but requires libvirt 0.9.7 or newer
• Delete auto-generated ssh keys after customization

A tarball of this release is available, as well as packages for Fedora-17. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki . If you have questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact me at clalancette@gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues . Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Release of ruby-libvirt 0.4.0

I'm pleased to announce the release of ruby-libvirt 0.4.0. ruby-libvirt is a ruby wrapper around the libvirt API. Version 0.4.0 brings new APIs, more documentation, and bugfixes:

• Updated Domain class, implementing dom.memory_parameters=,
  dom.memory_parameters, dom.updated?, dom.migrate2,
  dom.migrate_to_uri2, dom.migrate_set_max_speed,
  dom.qemu_monitor_command, dom.blkio_parameters,
  dom.blkio_parameters=, dom.state, dom.open_console, dom.screenshot,
  and dom.inject_nmi


• Implementation of the Stream class, which covers the
  libvirt virStream APIs


• Add the ability to build against non-system libvirt libraries


• Updated Error object, which now includes the libvirt
  code, component and level of the error, as well as all of
  the error constants from libvirt.h


• Updated Connect class, implementing conn.sys_info, conn.stream,
  conn.interface_change_begin, conn.interface_change_commit, and
  conn.interface_change_rollback


• Updated StorageVol class, implementing vol.download and vol.upload


• Various bugfixes

Version 0.4.0 is available from http://libvirt.org/ruby:

Tarball: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.4.0.tgz
Gem: http://libvirt.org/ruby/download/ruby-libvirt-0.4.0.gem

It is also available from rubygems.org; to get the latest version, run:

$ gem install ruby-libvirt

As usual, if you run into questions, problems, or bugs, please feel free to
mail me (clalance@redhat.com) and/or the libvirt mailing list.

ruby-libvirt in EPEL

Ohad Levy has recently implemented support for launching VMs via libvirt in The Foreman. As part of that, he needed ruby-libvirt bindings available in RHEL 5 and 6, so I've now built EPEL packages for both of these. They are in the "updates-candidates" tag for the time being; to get direct access, the packages are here:

EPEL 5
EPEL 6

Libvirt snapshotting support

One of the oft-requested features for libvirt has been snapshotting support; that is, the ability to take a snapshot of a virtual machine at a point in time, and then later on go back in time to that snapshot. It's a pretty neat feature to see in action, and under the hoods there is a lot of trickery going on to make it work. I'm pleased to say that as of libvirt 0.8.0, we have snapshotting support for qemu/kvm, Virtualbox, and ESX in the main libvirt API's.
The design of the API's went through many iterations, until we finally settled on an API that seems to fit the snapshot model of most of the hypervisors pretty well. To take a snapshot, virDomainSnapshotCreateXML() is used with an appropriate virDomainPtr and snapshot XML. The snapshot XML looks like:

<domainsnapshot>
  <name>XYZ</name>
  <creationdate>...</creationdate>
  <description>...</description>
  <state>running</state>
  <domain>
     <uuid>XXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXX</uuid>
  </domain>
  <parent>
    <name>ABC</name>
  </parent>
</domainsnapshot>

However, when creating a snapshot, only the <name> and <description> tags are settable by the user. All of the other fields are ignored and filled in by the libvirt driver at the time the snapshot is actually created. The <domainsnapshot> XML is pretty straightforward, but I'll describe the fields here.

<name> is a unique identifier for this snapshot for this domain. It's what will be used later on to lookup the snapshot to perform operations with it or on it. If the <name> is not specified at snapshot creation time, then libvirt will make one up.

<creationdate> is the time, in seconds since the Unix epoch, that the snapshot was created at. This is read-only and is automatically filled in by libvirt when the snapshot is created.

<description> is a user-editable field that can contain any unique identifying information the user wants to store along with the snapshot. If this is blank at snapshot creation time, it remains empty.

<state> is the state of the domain (running, offline, paused, etc) at the time the snapshot was taken. When a user reverts to a particular snapshot, the domain's state will be set to this state.

<domain><uuid> is the UUID corresponding to the domain that this snapshot is taken against.

<parent><name> is the name of the parent of this snapshot (if any). This tracks the parent/child relationship in "trees" of snapshots. It is important information to know when deleting snapshots, as deleting a parent snapshot has interesting repercussions for children (see virDomainSnapshotDelete() below).

Once you've created a snapshot, you can lookup the snapshot by name, query all of the snapshots for a domain, or get the currently running snapshot for a domain. At some point in the future, the user will probably want to revert back to the snapshot he has taken. To do this, a handle to the domain snapshot must be obtained with virDomainSnapshotLookupByName(). Once the handle is obtained, the domain can be reverted to the point-in-time of that snapshot by calling virDomainRevertToSnapshot(). This is pretty cool to see in action; the domain is running along, and the moment virDomainRevertToSnapshot() is called, the domain instantly travels back to the past!

Finally, I'll talk a bit about deleting snapshots. Once a user is done using a snapshot, they may want to delete that snapshot. In the simple case of a snapshot without children, a call to virDomainSnapshotDelete() will remove all traces of the snapshot. If a snapshot does have children, then things get more interesting. First, if the VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_DELETE_CHILDREN flag is passed to virDomainSnapshotDelete(), then the current snapshot and all children of this snapshot are deleted. Second, if VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_DELETE_CHILDREN is *not* passed, but this snapshot does have children, then all changes that are present in the to-be-deleted parent are automatically merged into the children. If you think about it, this is necessary to keep the children viable.

That's some of the fun stuff going on in libvirt. If you have questions, comments, or problems with this feature, please feel free to contact the libvirt mailing list at libvirt-users@redhat.com or libvirt-devel@redhat.com.