RHEL 7 Virtualization Host Installation

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• Linux Virtualization Installation

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• 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:

OS Installation with LifeCycle Controller

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:

Virtualization Host Storage Operations

Virtualization Host Network Configuration

Configure virtualization host networking as described here:

Virtualization Host Network Operations

Enable libvirt-guests

Configure libvirt-guests to gracefully shut down the guests and enable libvirt-guests:

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.