Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Auto-Installing oVirt Node


technical support
oVirt - maybe you've heard about it. It's a project to create an open IaaS "virtualization management system" - So a bit like OpenStack, but different.
Fedora is the base for oVirt's hypervisor: "Node". Basicaly this is a stripped down Fedora, enriched with a couple of packages to prvide just enough to host some virtual guests and do some basic configuration.

Personally I'd like to use Node in conjunction with Gnome Boxes or virt-manager. But this is currently not possible - but we might get closer to it when solving this bug.
Anyhow, to quickly install oVirt Node you just need to add two (or three) additional kernel arguments:
BOOTIF=ethX storage_init
You should/could also add
adminpw=$ADMINPW

ADMINPW=$(openssl passwd -salt SALT) is a salted password, so you can log in (as admin) after the installation. Alternatively you can boot into single mode to reset the password.

The parameters above install oVirt node without user intervention,  setup networking on ethX and erase all data on the disk and create a defautl (lvm based) partitioning scheme.
The next step would be adding Node to oVirt Engine - or wait until it can be managed by virt-manager, which is much quicker to set-up :)

2 comments:

  1. You should be able to look at the kickstart used to generate the ovirt node and adapt it for just running libvirtd. AFAIK, you can't (or aren't suppose to) run virt manager against vdsm. I am pretty sure it prevents you from connecting.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, virt-manager can't speak directly to vdsm. But vdsm is only enabled on the node if it's managed by oVirt Engine. Therefor it would be nice to allow a configuration which allows to use node from virt-manager/gnome-boxes.

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