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This might be a silly question, but... Is there any hypervisor or other virtualization solution which supports a "virtual IPMI" for virtual machines? I.e. would allow access to something that looks like power control, a serial-over-LAN console, etc. to a virtual machine.

This is really not the right way for managing virtual machines, I know. I'm looking for this because we make heavy use of IPMI for systems management and it would be interesting/useful to integrate VMs into the same framework, and because it'd be useful to have such an interface when I use VMs as a dev environment for systems management tools.

masegaloeh
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ajdecon
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  • It would definitely depend on the virtualization environment you're using. A partitioning system like FreeBSD's "jails" or Solaris Zones/Containers or Linux vserver would not allow something like this to occur because they don't provide hardware virtualization, but a commercial product like VMWare might. Ask your vendor, perhaps? – ghoti May 18 '12 at 02:38
  • What's the meaning of `it'd be useful to have such an interface when I use VMs as a dev environment for systems management tools.`? – 244boy Dec 10 '19 at 08:31

3 Answers3

5

I can't find reference to any hypervisor which implements IPMI, but there is some talk about implementing this in libvirt and qemu.

mgorven
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  • Thanks, @mgorven. It's good to know someone else is thinking about this, even if it doesn't exist yet... – ajdecon May 18 '12 at 19:24
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These days, such a beast does exist for libvirt, called VirtualBMC.

womble
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I have something like this in place in RHEV 3, where the VM's power management is easily done via a small script, and VNC/Spice and a serial console are available. Not IPMI as such, but the functionality is right there

EDIT: there is a fence-rhev agent available as well, so that would cover the power management part

dyasny
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