[Xen-API] Passing information between guest and remote program using XenAPI

[Marcus Lagergren <marcus.lagergren@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I want to address an issue that we consider a XenAPI limitation.

We have a remote launcher program that wants to communicate with a guest 
on another machine, preferably through XenAPI.
There seems to be no generic way of passing information between the 
launcher and the guest using XenAPI. Something like writing and reading 
information to XenStore would be nice, but any other suggestion of how 
to pass information over the wire would be welcome. Note that we need to 
transfer data in both directions. Two typical use cases are:
* Guest OS wants to export an IP or a console log to the remote launcher.
* Remote launcher wants to tell the guest OS that it has read the 
console log
This has to be done without relying on the TCP/IP stack, because it's 
typically the TCP/IP stack is misconfigured.
Guest metrics can already be exported from a guest in XenAPI, but the 
problem is that they are read only.
Currently we've patched our XenAPI implementation - VM has been 
augmented with two methods - xenstore_write and xenstore_read, which 
have been implemented in XendAPI.py on the Xen machine.  This is not a 
viable solution in the long term, since we can't go and patch every Xen 
installation we want to run on.
I would like to propose that a similar mechanism for XenStore 
manipulation be added to the XenAPI, since I can think of several other 
uses for it.  Is there any other way to solve our problem using the 
existing API?
Regards,

Marcus Lagergren
Consulting member of technical staff
Oracle Corporation


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