Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Using oVirt Node with virt-manager


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Virtualization is already an ubiquitous technique.
Fedora provides packages for many of the Linux virtualization components through the yum virtualization group.
$ sudo yum groupinstall virtualization

Well, anyway - When doing virtualization you need a host, hosting your virtualized guests. If you don't want to do this on your local machine - because it hasn't got the capabilities, isn't beefy enough, ... - you can use oVirt Node as a hypervisor on a second machine which you can easily manage from Fedora using virt-manager.
This can be useful for a small working group or developers.

oVirt Node is based on Fedora and optimized to quickly get a hypervisor up an running. You actually do not need to care about all the constraints - networking, services, storage, ... - you need to consider if you setup a hypervisor yourself (which can also be done with  Fedora). It is also stripped down (~150MB) to preserve most of the RAM and storage space to the virtualized guests.

Anyhow:
  1. Download oVirt Node
  2. Install it on a machine with a recent Intel or AMD processor
  3. Log into the installed Node using admin and
    1. Configure a network interface
    2. Press F2 to drop to the console and run
    3. /usr/libexec/ovirt-config-password 
      1. set a root password
      2. enable SSH access
  4. Optional: ssh-copy-id your ssh key to node to allow a password-less login
  5. User virt-manager to create a new connection (File -> New Connection) to the installed Node (IP can be found on the Node's Status page)
    URI: qemu+ssh://$OVIRTNODE/system
($OVIRTNODE needs to replaced accordingly)
Actually oVirt Node is intended to be used with oVirt Engine, which can manage from one up to a couple of hundreds (?) of Nodes.
But the Engine setup itself is not as easy as just using virt-manager :)
At least - Engine would be the next step to get used to the oVirt components.

P.s.: You can use virsh vol-upload to get some data onto the node.

2 comments:

  1. So you figured out how to use internal storage on the oVirt-node ? How can you keep your vm's after a reboot or power-off ? Don't you need isci or nfs ?

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    Replies
    1. The images itself are stored on a separate partition which survives reboots (use findfmnt on the shell).
      But you are right, /etc/libvirt/qemu needs to be persisted additionally to keep the definitions around. You might want to persist additional directories if you are also using a custom network layout etc.

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