libvirt users - Mar 2012 - Problem using virt-manager to create a VM remotely

Well, not that remote. I'm trying to get it working 
from my laptop to an ancient workstation behind me
I use for testing.

I appear to get the connection okay.

 virt-manager --connect qemu+ssh://root@<host_ip>/system

I can click on the entry on the panel that comes up and
see facts about the remote machine.

I then tried the "Create a new virtual machine" item on the
tool bar. Fine so far. I get a nice looking panel for New VM and
since this is just an experiment, I call it "test". The
correct Connection is showing, ie the host ip (QEMU). 

I accept the default "Local install media (ISO or CDROM)"
and go to the next panel. I take the "Use ISO Image" and
then give it the full directory path and name of the iso
on the remote machine <host_ip>. I have tried leaving 
OS Type and version Generic; I have also tried setting them
to match the iso (an 11.10 i386 server). When I attempt to
go forward, it gives me an error panel, "Error Setting install
media location. Checking installer location failed:
Could not find media '/KdevArchive1/ubuntu-11.10-server-i386.iso'

On the off chance that it was trying to mount the iso from
my laptop instead of the test machine, I have also tried pointing
to the path of the same iso there as well with no joy.

I am finding very little documentation on the GUI mode and
none of it seems to give me any indication of what is going
wrong.

Ideas?

On 03/27/2012 02:08 PM, Dale Amon wrote:
> I accept the default "Local install media (ISO or CDROM)"
> and go to the next panel. I take the "Use ISO Image" and
> then give it the full directory path and name of the iso
> on the remote machine <host_ip>. I have tried leaving 
> OS Type and version Generic; I have also tried setting them
> to match the iso (an 11.10 i386 server). When I attempt to
> go forward, it gives me an error panel, "Error Setting install
> media location. Checking installer location failed:
> Could not find media '/KdevArchive1/ubuntu-11.10-server-i386.iso'
You've hit a sore point of mine.  Libvirt is not very smart about
distinguishing which file names are relative to the client and which are
relative to the remote libvirtd; and some APIs will fail if the file
name does not exist on the client, even though the API is documented as
only needing access to the file on the host.  This has come up before,
and even had some ideas on how to improve things, but as with many pet
peeves, it takes time to implement it and isn't at the top of my
priority list.

My personal workaround is to make sure that I have a storage pool
associated with every directory that I might want to access files on
when accessing a remote libvirtd.  virt-manager is lousy at letting you
specify remote absolute file names, but is good at letting you access
storage volume names that are relative to a remote storage pool.  But
even that could be improved - right now, <domain> XML must specify disks
as /path/to/file, although allowing an expression in terms of
pool:volume would make life a lot easier.
> 
> I am finding very little documentation on the GUI mode and
> none of it seems to give me any indication of what is going
> wrong.
Most gui issues with virt-manager are better discussed on
virt-tools-list at redhat.com.  This list tends to be lower-level with how
to use libvirt, rather than how to use the guis built on top of libvirt.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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