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Logical Domains Software

LDoms software is Sun Microsystem’s virtualization technology to subdivide a supported system’s resources (CPUs, memory, I/O, and storage) creating partitions called logical domains. Each logical domain can run an independent OS. The Logical Domains Manager is used to create and manage logical domains and maps logical domains to physical resources. The LDoms Manager provides a command-line interface and also exports an XML-based control interface. The Libvirt for LDoms driver uses this XML interface to communicate with the LDoms Manager to retrieve the LDoms data for:

• Listing domains

• Requesting CPU and memory resource updates

• Performing life-cycle actions for logical domains

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The virt-install Script

The virt-install script is a command-line tool that provides a straightforward way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. The virt-install Python script allows you to enter information about a guest (such as the name of the virtual machine, amount of memory to be allocated to the guest, path to the disk image of the guest) either as a set of command-line options or in response to a set of prompts. After entering required information, the virt-install script starts an installation. The virt-install script for LDoms uses the libvirt interface and virtinst module, which is provided by the Libvirt for LDoms 1.0.1 software. The virtinst module for LDoms uses the LDoms Manager’s CLI interface to create the guest domain, add resources to the guest domain, and start the guest domain.

The urlgrabber is an open source Python package that simplifies retrieving files and is used by the virtinst module for LDoms. The urlgrabber is included in this release without any modifications.

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The virt-manager Application

The virt-manager is a GNOME-based GUI application for monitoring and managing virtual machines. The virt-manager code is written primarily in Python. The virt-manager application uses the libvirt C API as an isolation layer to keep the application independent of a particular hypervisor technology and is outside the scope of this release.

The following diagram shows the components described in this overview. The shaded, or blue, components are part of this Libvirt for LDoms 1.0.1 software release.