Libvirt is easy to use and its design is simple. This is one of the key factors for the adoption of libvirt. In future, we will see more vendors and application developers using libvirt as the standard API for all of their interaction with any virtualization instances as it provides the most stable and easy to use abstraction currently available. Vmcasting Vmcasting is a cool new technology that can automate the deployment of virtual machine images using the popular RSS 2.0 format (http://www.vmcasting.org/). The machine image itself is transferred to a client as a .xvm archive, which is nothing but a simple tarfile that contains the following items: xvm.xml: An xml file describing the image archive. manifest.txt: The contents of the archive along with sha1 sums. mf-signature.asc: gpg signature for the manifest.txt file. signature.asc: gpg signature for the xvm.xml file. imagefiles: Any number of gzip compressed hard disk partition images. The Vmcasting website provides a download for a Debian image in the above format. The following screenshot shows the contents of the Debian .xvm archive. ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? Xen Future [ 126 ] The following is a sample xvm file from the archive:
Debian 3.1 Debian 3.1 minimal install optimized for XEN