Creating a Request for a Single VM¶

This example walks through the basic of creating an RSpec (xml file) requesting a single VM from a compute aggregate. This example does not require that geni-lib is configured with user credentials or keys - it will create an XML file that you can feed into another tool such as Jacks or Omni (other examples cover how to make this request using geni-lib itself).

Note

You can find the complete source code for this example in a single file in the geni-lib distribution in samples/onevm.py.

Walk-through¶

Since we only want to output the XML of the request, we need very few imports:

import geni.rspec.pg as PG
import geni.rspec.egext as EGX
import geni.rspec.igext as IGX

Note

While the first module is named ‘pg’ (after ProtoGENI), the base rspec format is common across compute aggregates and all will use the same Request container, although the resources in that container will differ based on what is available at a given site.

Now we need to create the basic Request container:
```
r = PG.Request()
```
Unfortunately there is no unified VM object for all compute aggregates, so you will need to know which “flavor” of compute aggregate you intend to use (most commonly either InstaGENI or ExoGENI).

Note

In later examples you will see how, if you are using geni-lib to make your reservations directly with the aggregates, you can indeed create a single VM request that can be used across aggregate “flavors”.

Now we will allocate a VM object that can be added to our request (examples shown here for both ExoGENI and InstaGENI):
```
# ExoGENI
exovm = EGX.XOSmall("vm1")

# InstaGENI
igvm = IGX.XenVM("vm1")
```

Note

The only required configuration for each resource is the name argument that is passed to the constructor. These names must be unique within a single site, but can be reused at different sites.

For the purposes of this example we will only add the InstaGENI VM to the actual request that we will produce:
```
r.addResource(igvm)
```
Now that we have a request that contains a resource, we can write the XML to disk that represents this request:
```
r.writeXML("onevm-request.xml")
```