[Users] openvz naming conventions; numeric vs symbolic

[Steve Wray]

Hi there,
I'm a long time user of Xen virtualisation and have been evaluating 
OpenVZ as a replacement for certain applications.

OpenVZ appears to be technically superior under certain conditions and I 
hope to iron out the issues that I have come across.

The main issue confronting me at this time is scalability of management; 
OpenVZ may scale well with respect to performance and resource usage but 
at this time I don't see it scaling well when it comes to management of 
virtual machines.

I am sure that I must be missing something obvious since its a pretty 
basic issue. I've searched extensively for some info on this but found 
nothing.

The problem?

Numeric rather than symbolic identification of virtual machines.

When I start a domU (a Xen virtual machine) in Xen I direct 'xm create' 
at the config file the name of which corresponds to the name of that domU.

When I list currently running machines in Xen I see a listing of the 
names of the Xen domUs and their corresponding numeric IDs.

When I create a logical volume for a Xen domU I create that volume based 
on the name of the corresponding Xen instance.

In each case I try to ensure consistency by making the names of the Xen 
domUs correspond to the hostnames of the servers which those domUs are 
running. Host foo is on the domU named foo and is in a logical volume 
named foo. To start domU foo I run 'xm create 
/etc/xen/domains/foo.conf'. This scales well and makes things very nice 
and obvious.

OpenVZ seems to do away with symbolic names referring in all instances 
to numeric ids, a bit like not using DNS but putting an IP address into 
a URL.

I have an awful feeling that when the pager goes off at 2am the person 
on call, bleary-eyed and tired, will make some horrible mistake when 
trying to mentally map numeric identifiers to server hostnames. This is 
what I mean by 'not scaling well'. Use of numeric identifiers may work 
ok when there is only one or two, but when there may be a dozen things 
will get out of hand.

I am sure that there must be a way to use symbolic names instead of 
numbers in OpenVZ but I can't for the life of me find out how.

Thanks!