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
Qemu actually supports this natively now. Not sure what would be required for libvirt support.
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
(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. :)
(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
any update on this?
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.
it's been a while. Cole did you find any time to devote to this?
I believe libvirt supports accessing CDROM over HTTP yet but it hasn't been exposed in virt-manager/virt-install yet, sorry.
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 ***