RHEL 7 Virtualization Host Installation
Internal
Relevance
- RHEL 7.3
Virtualization Host Prerequisites
The host requires minimum 6 GB of free disk space and minimum 2 GB or RAM.
Installed with 50 GB root partition, 4 GB RAM and 4 GB swap.
Virtualization Host Installation
if the virtualization host runs on a Dell server, install the host operating system following the procedure described here:
The procedure will update the Dell firmware and drivers and then will pass control to the native O/S installer, that should be driven as described below. Note that the only areas in which the virtualization host installation procedure differs from a regular server installation procedure is Storage Provisioning and Virtualization Host-Specific Configuration. In consequence:
- first configure storage, follow the Storage Provisioning instructions, below.
- then execute the normal server installation procedure RHEL 7 Installation.
- then return to Virtualization Host-Specific Configuration.
Storage Provisioning
Mount Point: /boot capacity 1024 MiB, standard partition xfs file system (/dev/sda3)
Mount Point: / capacity 50 GiB, standard partition xfs file system (/dev/sda5)
Mount Point: /swap capacity 4 GiB (/dev/sda6)
Leave the rest of the space unallocated, will create later the local storage pool for virtual machines using one of the procedures described here: KVM Storage Pool Configuration.
Virtualization Host-Specific Configuration
Virtualization Packages
yum install -y qemu-kvm qemu-img libvirt virt-manager libguestfs-tools libvirt-client virt-install libguestfs-tools-c virt-top virt-what
Among other things, installing these packages enables libvirtd to start at boot, automatically.
Virtualization Host Storage Provisioning
Create a host storage pool and storage volumes, as described here:
Create a directory-based storage pool for DVD ISO images, as described here. We usually expose /iso-images as a storage pool and we add the ISO image files there as storage volumes:
Virtualization Host Network Configuration
Modify the DHCP range of the default virtual network - or any network being installed - to allow for statically configured addresses. Follow the procedure descried here:
Enable libvirt-guests
Enable libvirt-guests and configure guest startup/shutdown behavior:
systemctl enable libvirt-guests
Guest Creation
Create guest as needed, on command-line with virt-install or from previously generated XML definitions with virsh define: