Polymorphic Libvirt

The Libvirt virtualization library is great for interacting with heterogeneous hypervisors. Depending on the hypervisor connection, most domains support the same virtual machine interfaces. For instance, you can you the same code to start and stop virtual machines using Libvirt for both KVM and Xen.

But when the operation isn't supported for a particular hypervisor type, you better be prepared to handle this scenario. Libvirt only defines a single exception type but we can determine that it is a hypervisor interface support issue by looking at the error code.

This is shown below. The following operation on the domain will fail on KVM.

import libvirt

if __name__ == "__main__":

   conn = libvirt.open("qemu:///system")

   for id in conn.listDomainsID():

       domain = conn.lookupByID(id)
      
       try:
           domain.reboot(0)
       except libvirt.libvirtError, e:
           if e.get_error_code() == libvirt.VIR_ERR_NO_SUPPORT:
               print "Cannot Reboot"