[TriLUG] Xen: Identifying Host from Guest

Andrew Ball anball at gmail.com
Tue May 8 01:01:15 EDT 2007


I'm certain that Xen doesn't provide a simple means for the guests to
identify the control
partition.  That doesn't mean that this isn't a good idea.  It would be kind
of fun to
expose the UUID of the physical host via sysfs.

I implemented SMBIOS for the fully virtualized guests, allowing them to
identify themselves.
Systems management software like IBM Virtualization Manager correlates the
dom0's
with domU's by asking dom0's what domU's are on them at any given time.

Paravirtualized domU's can read their UUID's at /sys/hypervisor/uuid .
Reading xenstore
through libxenstore gets to the inter-domain communications bus / database.
I seriously
doubt that you could find out what the identity of the host is that way, but
it would be a convenient
way to do it.  Regardless, it would be sensible to expose this in sysfs.  It
would come from
xenstore anyway.

I'd be interested in working on this sometime.  Let me know if you'd like to
spend some time on
it.

Peace.
Andrew


On 5/3/07, Sean Myers <smyers at americanri.com> wrote:
>
> It seems like you'd have to invent this system yourself by some creative
> means, such as delivering virtual block devices in a standardized manner
> containing the necessary info from the Dom0, utilizing Xen's XMLRPC
> backend, or some similar trick.
>
> I'd be pretty surprised if Xen does do this, though.
>
> --
> Sean Myers
> System Administrator
> American Research Institute
> (919) 228-4961
>
>
> Ken Mink wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> >  We've got a number of machines using Xen to host other 'machines'.
> > The guests sometimes get moved from one host to another. Is there a
> > way to identify the host from inside one of the guests? I've poked
> > around in proc and can't seem to find anything.
> >
> > TIA,
> > Ken
> >
> --
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-- 
=======================
Andrew D. Ball
勃安足


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