Re: Interface for hw pass-through over multiple VMs; and controlling hosts

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

Okay, after digging more into a virtualization ecosystem and talking to
people I found an answer, so let me share it with you, since I'm
clearly the only one with the knowledge on the mailing list.

The interface to chose hw to pass through to a VM is called a
"hypervisor".

The interface to manage multiple hypervisors Idk if has any name, but
usually depending on the hypervisor you chose there are solutions to
manage them.

For example: there is a Proxmox hypervisor, and Proxmox also provides
an interface to manage multiple Proxmox hosts. In Proxmox after you
created a VM you can "add device" and chose a raw PCI device (so
there's the list of devices to pass through).

Proxmox uses QEMU (and it also supports containers and stuff but I
didn't look at that).

As a non-QEMU based example, there's a ESXi as a host that manages
hardware and vSphere as a host that manages multiple ESXies. So Proxmox
has both solutions in one product, while in VMWare case they are
separate ones.

On Fri, 2023-08-18 at 17:05 +0300, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
> Hello! I work in a small NAS company and am solving an interesting
> problem which I wonder if it has been solved before…
> 
> So before reinventing the wheel I decided to ask if there are
> existing
> solutions, projects…
> 
> Basically, we have growing number of developers but limited amount of
> hardware nodes. So the idea came up to create Virtual Machines on
> each
> host, and then whenever a developer needs access to an actual
> hardware
> (e.g. a Fiber Channel, specific HDD/SDD model, or certain network
> adapter), pass-through it to the VM.
> 
> Sounds simple so far, but the following two points arise:
> 
> 1. Some interface needed (whether terminal-based or not) for
> developer
> to chose hw to pass through, which should also account for whether
> the
> hw is being used in another VM.
> 2. Some interface is needed for small maintenance tasks over all such
> hardware hosts, e.g. to update the OS or to add some config.
> 
> While I could find something for 2, I have no expertise in 1 (not to
> say I have expertise in 2 though, I just know people do that). I
> mention both points though, any ideas are welcome!
> 
> Any thoughts?