HI Cedric,

Thanks for your reply – that’s very useful to know and saves me spending any more time trying to do something that wasn’t intended.

This is not a feature that we are desperate for; we have other build systems that work well and this was an exploration of potentially better systems.

Will address the documentation as suggested.

Thanks again,

Simon

From: Cedric Bosdonnat via Uyuni Users <users@lists.uyuni-project.org>
Sent: 25 April 2022 08:54
To: users@lists.uyuni-project.org; uyuni-users@opensuse.org
Cc: Cedric Bosdonnat <CBosdonnat@suse.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL EMAIL] Re: Create vms with VmWare - possible?

Hi Simon,

On Fri, 2022-04-22 at 08:41 +0000, Simon Avery wrote:

Quick question: Can Uyuni provision new VMs using VmWare, or is that functionality restricted to Xen and Kvm?

Quick answer no it can't!

More detailled one:

The VMware hosts are only covered by the virtual host manager feature as of now, and this doesn't modify the VM states.

The virtualization Host entitlement uses Salt virt states and modules under the hood, which in turn uses libvirt python API.

So in theory it should be possible to support VMware hosts with the feature... but in practice this has never been tested and probably requires changes in the Uyuni and Salt code bases.

I would happily review any PR adding this support, but I don't have cycles to do it myself.

Another note: VMware libvirt driver is not supported and built on SLES. This is not important for Uyuni but this means that such a feature would not show up in SUSE Manager.

Background:

We have a VCenter cluster running our vms.  By following the documentationhere, I’ve successfully added Vsphere as a VHM and it’s populating correctly.(Thanks for the bugfix in the new Uyuni version that now does correctly display the Virtualization tab that allowed me to get further than last time I tried this)

But the “Create Guest” link as mentioned in the docs is absent.

The doc would need a fix to state that this feature is only for systems with the 'Virtualization Host' add-on... which means only KVM and Xen.

Could you please file a bug for the doc or submit a PR on https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs??

Elsewhere in the official docs it does say

For VMWare, including VMWare vSphere, and Nutanix AHV, Uyuni requires you to set up a virtual host manager (VHM) to control the VMs. This gives you control over the hosts and guests, but in a more limited way than available with Xen and KVM.

But I’ve also found this on some unofficial documentation here that seems to give more specific guidance

Autoinstalling and managing {vmguest}s via Uyuni is limited to {xen} and {kvm} guests. 

Looks like this mention has been dropped while it shouldn't.

Regards,

--

Cedric