[Xen-devel] Xen & Automated Disk Management for Domains

[Michael Vrable <mvrable@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm experimenting with using Xen to simulate a network of computers for
security research--essentially to create a network of honeypots using
one (or a few) systems running Xen.  This is all using the development
branch of Xen.

One feature that would be really nice to have is the ability to easily
manage the disk images used by the Xen domains, so that I could, for
example, quickly load a particular Linux distribution on a set of LVM
logical volumes, then start a new Xen instance with those.

This isn't terribly difficult to do with a few scripts running in Domain
0, and I already have a basic working version.  But as I'm looking at
cleaning this code up, I'm wondering if it this functionality wouldn't
be useful to others, and if it's worth integrating into the Xen control
tools.

Are there any current tools to do this sort of thing?  Any plans for
such tools (in xend, the future Xen Cluster Daemon, or elsewhere)?
Would it be worthwhile to try to make my code more general so that it
could possibly be included in Xen?  Integration with xend/xm has some
benefits:
  - management over the network comes almost for free
  - could integrate better with domain management; for example, it would
    be easy to check that logical volumes for a running domain aren't
    accidentally deleted
On the other hand:
  - perhaps there are already plans to accomplish this in some other way
  - the persistence requirements for disk images are different than for
    domains, and so there's not a perfect match

Would anyone else find it useful if I worked on this?  If so, what features
would you like to see?  Or am I going about this the wrong way?

--Michael Vrable


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