I do not enjoy having subdirectories involved for storing files in libvert. The virt-manager interface is just way too brutal about how you manually add storage pools. After much ranting, I wrote a bash script to add these directories for my VM disk images.

  1 #!/bin/bash
  2 
  3 set -e
  4 #set -x
  5 existing_pools=()
  6 export existing_pools
  7 
  8 function add_this_dir() {
  9     local -n xisting_pools="$1"
 10     if [ ! -d "$2" ]; then
 11       echo "add_this_dir: $2 is not a directory"
 12       return
 13     fi
 14     local shortname=`basename $2`
 15     if [[ " ${xisting_pools[@]} " =~ " $2 " ]]; then
 16       echo "$2 already exists"
 17       sudo virsh pool-start "$shortname"  &>/dev/null ||:
 18       sudo virsh pool-autostart "$shortname"  &>/dev/null ||:
 19       return
 20     fi
 21     if [[ " ${xisting_pools[@]} " =~ " $shortname " ]]; then
 22       echo "$shortname already exists"
 23       sudo virsh pool-start "$shortname" &>/dev/null ||:
 24       sudo virsh pool-autostart "$shortname" &>/dev/null  ||:
 25       return
 26     fi
 27     sudo virsh pool-define-as --name $shortname --type dir --target "$2" --source-path "$2"
 28     sleep 1
 29     sudo virsh pool-start "$shortname" &>/dev/null ||:
 30     sudo virsh pool-autostart "$shortname"  &>/dev/null ||:
 31     sleep 1
 32 }
 33 
 34 while read L; do
 35   if [[ x$L = x ]]; then continue; fi
 36   hunks=($L) 
 37   existing_pools+=("${hunks[0]}")
 38 done < <(sudo virsh pool-list --all | grep -v -e Autostart -e '----' )
 39 
 40 echo "You have these existing pools defined: "
 41 echo "%%${existing_pools[@]}%%"
 42 
 43 while read D; do
 44   add_this_dir existing_pools "/tank/VMs/$D"
 45 done < <(ls /tank/VMs) 
 46 while read D; do
 47   add_this_dir existing_pools "/tank/softlib/iso/$D"
 48 done < <(ls /tank/softlib/iso)