Libvirt Set Admin Root Password¶
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/libvirt-set-admin-password
Nova provides an API to let users set an administrator password on a virtual machine which is already active. The purpose of this spec is to take advantage of the libvirt API set-user-password provided with version 1.2.16 to implement that feature for Qemu/KVM users.
Problem description¶
Nova provides API to let users set an administrator password but Qemu/KVM users cannot take advantage of it.
Use Cases¶
Users want the ability to reset administrator password of an instance which is already active by using the command “nova root-password <instance>”
Project Priority¶
None.
Proposed change¶
To be noted this feature requires that the image have the qemu guest agent installed to function. Most of the change will be done in the libvirt driver of Nova.
In order to support both unix-like (GNU/Linux) virtual machines and Windows the default behavior will be to update password of username “root” for unix-like virtual machines and “Administrator” for Windows.
To give more flexibility and provide a way for users to change administrator password of a different username. A new image property “os_admin_user” will be introduced to let users define who is the administrator username to update.
Alternatives¶
The use case for this API is to allow an admin to re-gain control over an already running guest for which they have lost the password, or for an admin to bulk change the passwords across all their running guests, without having to login to the console of each guest manually/individually. The inject password feature doesn’t really satisfy that.
Data model impact¶
None
REST API impact¶
None
Security impact¶
None
Notifications impact¶
None
Other end user impact¶
The end user will have to install a QEMU Guest Agent daemon program inside the image and set the image property ‘hw_qemu_guest_agent’.
If the image request a different username to be updated, end user will have to correctly set image property ‘os_admin_user’.
Performance Impact¶
None
Other deployer impact¶
None
Developer impact¶
None
Implementation¶
Assignee(s)¶
- Primary assignee:
sahid-ferdjaoui
Work Items¶
Implement method set_admin_password
Extend the method set_admin_password to read in image property for specific admin user
Dependencies¶
Libvirt 1.2.16
Testing¶
Unit tests will cover the new code
The nova API is already covered by tests
Documentation Impact¶
The new glance image property will need to be documented.
