7.227. virt-who

Bug Fixes

BZ#1199397

Previously, virt-who used the value of the "--esx-server" command-line option instead of the "--satellite-server" option value. As a consequence, virt-who attempted to report a host-guest association to the ESX server instead of satellite, and thus failed. With this update, "--satellite-server" works as intended, and virt-who uses the correct server when connecting to Red Hat Satellite.

BZ#1155679

The virt-who service was too slow when reading the association between hosts and guests from VMWare ESX systems. As a consequence, when communicating with large ESX (or vCenter) deployments, it took a lot of time to send updates about virtual guests to the Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) and Red Hat Satellite. With this update, virt-who uses an improved method to obtain host-guest association, which accelerates the aforementioned process.

BZ#1192942

The virt-who service ignored the HTTP proxy configuration in the ESX virtualization back end. As a consequence, virt-who did not use the proxy server when connecting to the ESX server, and the connection could fail. With this update, virt-who uses the http_proxy environment variable in ESX mode, thus fixing this bug.

BZ#1169006

Because certain versions of the VMWare ESX hypervisor do not support the RetrieveProperties method, virt-who failed when obtaining information from the ESX hypervisor. With this update, virt-who no longer uses the RetrieveProperties method and instead works asynchronously, using the WaitForUpdatesEx method. As a result, virt-who is now able to reliable obtain information from the ESX hypervisor.

BZ#1167451

Logging in to a Red Hat Satellite 5 server with virt-who previously failed with an "incomplete format" error. With this update, virt-who uses correct credentials for connecting to Satellite 5 servers, and the login now works.

Enhancements

BZ#1192217

The virt-who service is now capable of filtering which virtualization cluster or clusters it will report. This allows users to automatically filter out clusters that do not contain any Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests, and not to display these redundant clusters.

BZ#1184665

With this update, virt-who allows filtering which hosts are reported to the Subscription Manager. As a result, users can now choose for virt-who not to display hosts with specified parameters, such as hosts that do not run any Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests.

BZ#1173018

The virt-who service can now report the association between hosts and guests when offline, and thus no longer requires connection to the hypervisor to perform this operation. When virt-who cannot be connected to the hypervisor, for instance due to a security policy, users can now obtain information about the host-guest mapping file by using the "virt-who --print" command, which loads the information from the mapping file, and imports it to the Subscription Manager.

BZ#1154877

The support for encrypted passwords has been added to virt-who. Previously, any user with read privileges to the virt-who configuration file was able to read the passwords to external services stored in the configuration file as plain text. This update introduces the virt-who-password utility, which allows encrypting passwords stored in the virt-who configuration file. Note that the root user can still decrypt the encrypted passwords.