Original draft by Hari Kannan

Introduction

Purpose

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This is the requirement/functional specification for a feature to allow users to append the display name of a guest VM to the internal name (the name with which cloudstack creates the VM on the actual hypervisor) of a guest VM. This feature follows a request from the field that admins preferred to have this facility to locate guest VMs easily when fielding customer calls. This helps especially in vmware deployments (vCenter).

Related jira tickets

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-778

Explanation of “Names” in cloudstack

• Display Name: user can optionally specify a “name” when requesting a VM to be stood up – this name is purely a “GUI” name, as neither CloudStack backend nor VMware or the VM OS instance knows about this VM OS
• Hostname: this is a unique UUID generated by CloudStack (‘output of hostname command’, but not the name known to vCenter/hypervisor)
• Internal Name: created by CS (conforming to a spec) and this is the name known/displayed by vCenter/hypervisor as well.

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