Wistar is a tool to help create and share network topologies of virtual machines. It is designed to be light weight enough to run on a laptop or a small dedicated server.
currently vm names are restricted to 7 characters. This is kinda silly and only there due to the way we create and name networks. For networks that are used only to connect a VM to a companion VM, such as vqfx-re to vqfx-pfe, we create a dedicated network with a name of the form: tXX_HHH_c where XX is the topology id and HHH is the vm-re name. The VM RE name can't be more than 7 characters as libvirt has a restriction on the length of the network name. The proposal here would change the logic for network names to just be something unique. The value of mapping network names to topologies easily is probably less than the value of having host name with names greater than 7 characters.
nembery
commented
7 years ago
currently vm names are restricted to 7 characters. This is kinda silly and only there due to the way we create and name networks. For networks that are used only to connect a VM to a companion VM, such as vqfx-re to vqfx-pfe, we create a dedicated network with a name of the form: tXX_HHH_c where XX is the topology id and HHH is the vm-re name. The VM RE name can't be more than 7 characters as libvirt has a restriction on the length of the network name. The proposal here would change the logic for network names to just be something unique. The value of mapping network names to topologies easily is probably less than the value of having host name with names greater than 7 characters.