Kvmcli V0.9
Introducing New Features in kvmcli v0.9
Date: 01 May 2023
In this blog post, I will present the latest release of kvmcli, kvmcli version 0.9, and the new features it brings. This release serves as a preparation for the upcoming stable release, kvmcli 1.0.
1 Improvements and Features in v0.9
kvmcli v0.9 introduces the following features and improvements:
1.1 Multiprocessing
As you can already guessed, sequential provisioning is not efficient for this use case.
To enhance the performance of the provisioning process, kvmcli now utilizes multiprocessing. This is particularly useful for provisioning a large number of virtual machines across several clusters (each containing 10 to 20 virtual machines for example).
With v0.9, you can now specify the number of processes kvmcli can launch during the provisioning process.
This is done through a new section in the configuration file called misc with a key called fork, specifying the number of parallel processes that kvmcli can launch.
Here's an example of how to set the fork value in the configuration file:
[misc] fork = 5
In the example above, I instructed kvmcli to launch five independent processes to provision my cluster. If I set fork = 0, kvmcli will use a number of processes equal to the number of cores in my computer.
1.2 New option kvmcli --init
or kvmcli -I
A new option, kvmcli --init, has being added. This option enables users to create a cluster template. The contents of the template is stored in a YAML file.
A new configuration key allows for the specification of the template's name.
The example below demonstrates the new option usage.
Specify the name of the template file in the configuration file.
[yaml] path = "servers.yml" template = "servers.yml"
Then use --init to create this template.
kvmcli --init
Template file with the name `servers.yml` is created !
A template file will be created with the name specified in the configuration, containing the basic configuration for a node.
cat servers.yml
version: 1.0
vms:
- info:
name: node1
image: rocky9.1
ram: 1536
cpus: 1
os: rocky9
network:
interface:
bridge: virbr1
mac_address: 02:A3:10:00:00:XX
storage:
disk:
format: qcow2
size: 30
type: SSD
2 Other improvements
Other changes in this release include improvements in project structure, code cleaning…etc.
Until the next release, feel free check the project's repository on GitHub for more information.
