Non-intrusive virtualization management using libvirt

The success of server virtualization has let to the deployment of a huge number of virtual machines in today´s data centers, making a manual virtualization management very labor-intensive. The development of appropriate management solutions is hindered by the various management interfaces of different hypervisors. Therefore, a uniform management can be simplified by a layer abstracting from these dedicated hypervisor interfaces. The libvirt management library provides such an interface to different hypervisors. Unfortunately, remote hypervisor management using libvirt has not been possible without altering the managed servers. To overcome this limitation, we have integrated remote hypervisor management facilities into the libvirt driver infrastructure for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V. This paper presents the resulting architecture as well as experiences gained during the implementation process.