RHEL 7 Virtualization Host Installation

From NovaOrdis Knowledge Base
Revision as of 23:54, 17 October 2017 by Ovidiu (talk | contribs) (→‎Guest Creation)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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:

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:

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.

RHELVirtualizationHostStorageConfiguration.png

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

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:

Directory-Based Storage Pool Configuration

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:

Modifying the Range of the DHCP Server for a Virtual Network

Enable libvirt-guests

Enable libvirt-guests and configure guest startup/shutdown behavior:

systemctl enable libvirt-guests
Configure Guests to Gracefully Shut Down
Configure Guests to Start at Boot

Guest Creation

Create guest as needed, on command-line with virt-install or from previously generated XML definitions with virsh define:

Create a Guest Virtual Machine