Xanthan¶ ↑

Xanthan is a ruby wrapper for the Citrix XenServer XenAPI (not the pure open source Xen). Citrix XenServer exposes a full set of management APIs for administering most all aspects of the XenServer platform, the XenCenter actually product uses these same APIs. While Xanthan is not currently offer complete coverage of the XenAPI it tries to cover the most commonly used functions.

Xanthan has its own methods to wrap much of the XenAPI functionality due to the need for error handling and callback functionality. However it is still possible to easily call api methods that aren’t implemented, or to extend Xanthan.

Currently Xanthan is written as a Ruby On Rails plugin, but will be packaged as a gem in the future.

Installation¶ ↑

Run the following command from your RAILS_ROOT

./script/plugin install git://github.com/parkersmith/Xanthan.git

Once installed you’ll want to set constants for XEN_SERVER_USERNAME, XEN_SERVER_PASSWORD, and XEN_SERVER_MASTER (the host pool master’s IP)

Features¶ ↑

Most VM features are implemented using both synchronous and asynchronous APIs.

• VM: start, clean shutdown, hard shutdown, clean reboot, hard reboot

• VM: create snapshot, delete snapshot, revert to snapshot

• VM: suspend and resume

• VM: get disks (VBDs and VDIs)

• VM: provision from template or backup

• VM: clone

• VM: destroy

• VM: get consoles (connect via Java VNC)

• VM: get metrics

• Host: list resident VMs.

Usage¶ ↑

Create an asynchronous snapshot of a VM¶ ↑

require 'rubygems'
require '../lib/xanthan'
include Xanthan

host = Host.connect("https://#{XEN_SERVER_MASTER}", XEN_SERVER_USERNAME, XEN_SERVER_PASSWORD)
link = host.get_link

#needs to be a UUID of a current VM
vm_uuid = "60bdf52e-119a-3bcb-1d10-25a2cf6d1111"
vm = VM.find_by_uuid(link, vm_uuid)
task_result = vm.do_snapshot_async("my new snapshot")

Create a new VM from an existing snapshot¶ ↑

require 'rubygems'
require '../lib/xanthan'
include Xanthan

host = Host.connect("https://#{XEN_SERVER_MASTER}", XEN_SERVER_USERNAME, XEN_SERVER_PASSWORD)
link = host.get_link

#needs to be a UUID of a current snapshot
snapshot_uuid = "60bdf52e-119a-3bcb-1d10-25a2cf6d2222"
VM.create_new_from_snapshot(link, snapshot_uuid, "myVMFromSnapshot")

Contributors¶ ↑

• Brian Webb (parkersmithsoftware.com)

Legal Mumbo Jumbo¶ ↑

Unless otherwise noted in specific files, all code in the Xanthan project is under the copyright and license described in the included MIT-LICENSE file.