[Users] openvz naming conventions; numeric vs symbolic

[Kir Kolyshkin]

See vzctl set --name

Steve Wray wrote:
> 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!
>
>
>
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