Original draft by Hari Kannan

Introduction

Purpose

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 the hypervisor nor the OS running the guest VM knows about this name. Cloudstack stores and uses this name only for identification of the VM via the GUI.
• Hostname: this is a unique UUID generated by CloudStack (‘output of hostname command in the guest VM’, 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. This is the name of the VM as it appears on the hypervisor platform.

Requirement

• User provided Display Name needs to be appended to the Internal Name (can be seen by vCenter/ESX/other hypervisors).
• Create a global setting that will enable this functionality, with default value to be false.
• This setting of user provided hostname is possible only when VM is instantiated (for the first time).
• Apply this feature to all supported hypervisors.