power type virtualbox

[khb]

Request for Enhancement

blog.ubuntu.com/2015/01/15/virtualbox-extensions-for-maas has a lovely writeup explaining motivation and a Mac OS X hosted VirtualBox/MAAS mashup. Unfortunately, the hooks it uses no longer seem to exist in modern MAAS releases. As all of the bits are stale (Mac OS X, VirtualBox, MAAS) I sought a modern replacement. In MAAS 2.4 and 2.5, there is "virsh" power type support, which ought to suffice. However, the current Homebrew formulae fail (obviously, NOT canonical's problem or fault). However, it would be nice if MAAS "stood on it's own", and simply provided direct support for a VirtualBox powertype. If that isn't something the project is willing to provide (VboxManage calls should provide sufficient functionality) then providing a generic set of scripts which will be invoked by MAAS would enable a smooth path for users.

Since there's virsh, vmware and openstack powertypes, it seems like this ought to be within reason.

There's no obvious reason to not handle Parallels, but it's been some years since I've used it.

Adding a pointer to a newer writeup in the existing blog post would be helpful.

In the alternative, leveraging the Apple xhyve hypervisor might be useful ... but I suspect that for fullest fidelity to a physical deployment, the VirtualBox approach may be most helpful.

My plan was to develop a field training module ... so technicians could get some hands on before hacking on the actual production hardware. VirtualBox would be ideal in that it would work on Mac and Windows removing potential impediments to deployment.

[Lee Trager (ltrager)]

We currently don't have any plans to support VirtualBox however it may be possible to use virt-manager to control VirturalBox[1].

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1081044

[khb (khbkhb)]

note that the provided RH pointer explicitly says "CLOSED WONTFIX" so it's not a terribly helpful approach ;>

That the older MAAS was "more featureful" in the sense of having accessible hooks to enable this (and that the approach is still documented on the canonical site) makes this extra annoying.

[khb (khbkhb)]

Sorry, should have read the cited RH more closely. Yes, virt-manager GUI won't expose it (that's the won't fix); but the same underlying libvirt code which is misfiring in virsh (see https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2019-January/msg00014.html if curious).

Doubtless the issue is *really* in the HomeBrew formula for libvirt (note that there isn't a virt-manager in the base brew formula repo) ... but that is precisely the point. Putting multiple hurdles up simply makes MAAS less attractive.

I don't expect Canonical to fix brew, or libvirt ... but it is totally within Canonical's purview to extend the same support to VirtualBox (FOSS) as it has to VMware (proprietary). Or, in the alternative, to expose the appropriate hooks/callbacks as apparently earlier versions of MAAS provided.

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team

[khb (khbkhb)]

This is a request for enhancement. Closing it as "invalid" seems inappropriate. If the answer is won't fix, say so.

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

Thanks for your feature request, please could you start a thread over on our Discourse (https://discourse.maas.io/c/features) to discuss the feature?

[Saeid Bostandoust (ssbostan)]

You can use (https://github.com/ssbostan/vboxpower)

This is a wrapper to enabling MAAS to manage virtualbox vms power.