Bug 531420 - RFE: virt-manager: Allow accessing ISOs directly over http
Summary: RFE: virt-manager: Allow accessing ISOs directly over http
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of bug 1017308
Alias: None
Product: Virtualization Tools
Classification: Community
Component: virt-manager
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Cole Robinson
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2009-10-28 08:47 UTC by Stefan Assmann
Modified: 2014-02-01 20:55 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2014-02-01 20:55:27 UTC
Embargoed:


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Description Stefan Assmann 2009-10-28 08:47:02 UTC
Description of problem:
Currently a VM network installation works from a local ISO or a source tree situated on HTTP/FTP (and PXE of course). Now a really neat feature would be to allow installation from an ISO file on HTTP/FTP. No need to download ISOs anymore, just install them from the web!

The idea is to stream the ISO from HTTP/FTP and only download the requested chunks of the ISO.

workflow:
- create new virtual machine
- select network install
- enter URL of ISO (http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/fedora/linux/releases/11/Live/x86_64/Fedora-11-x86_64-Live.iso)
- installation starts

Comment 1 Cole Robinson 2009-10-28 13:14:08 UTC
Qemu actually supports this natively now. Not sure what would be required for libvirt support.

Comment 2 Mark McLoughlin 2009-10-29 17:33:40 UTC
Haven't tried it, but I think it should just work if you supply a http:// URL instead of a path

RFE, so moving to upstream tracker

Comment 3 Stefan Assmann 2009-10-30 08:11:51 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Haven't tried it, but I think it should just work if you supply a http:// URL
> instead of a path

Doesn't work, yet. :)

Comment 4 Mark McLoughlin 2009-10-30 08:59:21 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > Haven't tried it, but I think it should just work if you supply a http:// URL
> > instead of a path
> 
> Doesn't work, yet. :)  

I meant that for Cole - I'm guessing libvirt/qemu has what is needed, and it just needs support in virt-manager

Comment 5 Stefan Assmann 2011-01-14 12:35:41 UTC
any update on this?

Comment 6 Cole Robinson 2011-01-21 20:42:12 UTC
Sorry, still haven't played with this. I know libvirt recently grew a way to specify that storage is 'network' storage, which is probably how this option should be exposed.

The hard part is then deciding how to expose this in virt-manager. Entering a URL for a CDROM path already has a meaning: basically, fetch a boot.iso from this install tree. Additionally, I've been told that the qemu HTTP streaming is pretty slow, so it might actually be quicker in some cases to just transfer the iso locally.

Either way I haven't thought about it a ton so it probably won't happen in the short term.

Comment 7 Stefan Assmann 2011-10-17 07:34:46 UTC
it's been a while. Cole did you find any time to devote to this?

Comment 8 Cole Robinson 2011-10-18 13:19:26 UTC
I believe libvirt supports accessing CDROM over HTTP yet but it hasn't been exposed in virt-manager/virt-install yet, sorry.

Comment 9 Cole Robinson 2014-02-01 20:55:27 UTC
Turns out that libvirt only had real support for this added in the past year, it's network disk with protocol=http. We already have another bug tracking that, so duping to it. I don't think we will ever add explicit support for this in the virt-manager 'new vm' wizard, but we will eventually allow it to be used for install via the 'customize before install' wizard

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1017308 ***


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