virt-install: changing default --os-variant behavior

[Peter Crowther]

On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 at 21:10, Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
[...]

> 2) Default to --os-variant detect=on,name=<virtio-something>. 'give me
> virtio' is representative of what most virt-install users want. But this
> adds some new corner cases, ex if anyone is using virt-install with
> windows up until now they could get away without specifying a
> --os-variant and things would generally work, but now if we default to
> virtio windows out of the box is not going to install. I kinda doubt
> many people are using virt-install with windows though.
>

As feedback, this is the single largest use case in the main virtualisation
cluster I manage.  CentOS hosts, 90% Windows 7(!) and 8.1 guests.  We have
our virt-install scripted to add a floppy drive with autoinstall file,
virtio drivers, and a few other bits and pieces like a minimal puppet
client install (surprisingly non-trivial in Windows 7 gold), so we could
live with such a change; but please don't assume that if the hosts are
Linux then the guests are also likely to be Linux.

Why do we do it this way?  Because we're in a regulated environment, and it
means we can show an inspector (think FDA in the States) *exactly* how we
built each VM, with no magic "... yeah, and then we saved that disk image,
and we've cloned everything from it since... no, we can't reproduce it byte
for byte, because the location of the files is nondeterministic...".

[...]

Cheers,

- Peter
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