Welcome to Technology Short Take #80! This post is a week late (I try to publish these every other Friday), so my apologies for the delay. However, hopefully I’ve managed to gather together some articles with useful information for you. Enjoy!
This article is based on a single hardware node running Nutanix Community Edition (CE), built following the instruction in Part I: How to setup a three-node NUC Nutanix CE cluster. If you don't have hardware readily available, the article, 6 Nested Virtualization Resources To Get You Started With Community Edition, describes how to run Nutanix CE as a virtual machine.The sFlow standard is widely supported by network equipment vendors, which combined with sFlow from each Nutanix appliance, delivers end to end visibility in the Nutanix cluster. The following screen captures from the free sFlowTrend tool are representative examples of the data available from the Nutanix appliance.
Hi folks, I’m still heads down on a lot of different things. The release of RHV 4.1 is right around the corner, as is a new product that involves RHV 4.1. I’ve also cut some new demo’s on Hosted Engine using RHVH – just like I promised I would several weeks ago. Ok, a couple months ago. You’ll just have to come see me at Red Hat Summit to see them…Or wait until just after Red Hat Summit. I still don’t have my “new” lab, but I did get my hands on some good gear that allows me show you the goodness that is Hosted Engine, especially with RHVH (Red Hat Virtualization Host). Hopefully I’ll have the new lab soon…..
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m presenting at Red Hat Summit again this year, focusing on providing HA for RHV – by way of Hosted Engine. Here are the session details if you’re going to be there:
Thursday, May 4, 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM – Room 152
Red Hat Summit, May 2-4, Boston, MA
I promise to give the full write-up and share the demo’s post Summit.
Captain KVM
The post RHV 4.1, Continue reading
When Cisco ACI was launched it promised to do everything you need (plus much more, and in multi-hypervisor environment). It was quickly obvious that you can’t do all that on ToR switches, and need control of the virtual switch (the real network edge) to get the job done.
Read more ...There has been a lot of buzz in the industry about containers and how they are streamlining organizational processes. In short, containers are a modern application sandboxing mechanism that are gaining popularity in all aspects of computing from the home desktop to web-scale enterprises. In this post we’ll cover the basics: what is container networking and how can it help your data center? In the future, we’ll cover how you can optimize a web-scale network using Cumulus Linux and containers.
A container is an isolated execution environment on a Linux host that behaves much like a full-featured Linux installation with its own users, file system, processes and network stack. Running an application inside of a container isolates it from the host and other containers, meaning that even when the applications inside of them are running as root, they can not access or modify the files, processes, users, or other resources of the host or other containers.
Containers have become popular due to the way they simplify the process of installing and running an application on a Linux server. Applications can have a complicated web of dependencies. The newest version of an application may require a newer Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #79! There’s lots of interesting links for you this time around.
grep
of all my blog posts found nothing), so let me rectify that first. Skydive is (in the project’s own words) an “open source real-time network topology and protocols analyzer.” The project’s GitHub repository is here, and documentation for Skydive is here.Nothing this time around. Should I keep this section, or ditch it? Feel free to give me your feedback on Twitter.
Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.
It taps into the basic desires and needs of the users impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement.
To put it in other words, it is turning day-to-day tasks, the kind you might do at home or work, into a game which you can earn points, badges and compete with other people that are doing the same things.
You probably didn't know, but this isn't the first time oVirt gamification is being used. A few years ago there was an initiative to use oVirt UI plugins system to add Gamification to the project, there was even a "space invaders" game written and available to play inside oVirt!
The oVirt infra team recently reached out to 'GetBadges', a company which provides 'Gamification as a Service'. Luckily for us, open source projects get to have a free game! So oVirt was rewarded with its own oVirt Open Source Game.
The game works automagically every time you contribute to the project. Current integrations are only active on specific projects like 'ovirt-engine' and Continue reading
This post addresses a (mostly) cosmetic issue with the current way that Arista distributes its Vagrant box for vEOS. I say “mostly cosmetic” because while the Vagrant box for vEOS is perfectly functional if you use it via Arista’s instructions, adding metadata as I explain here provides a small bit of additional flexibility should you need multiple versions of the vEOS box on your system.
If you follow Arista’s instructions, then you’ll end up with something like this when you run vagrant box list
:
arista-veos-4.18.0 (virtualbox, 0)
bento/ubuntu-16.04 (virtualbox, 2.3.1)
centos/6 (virtualbox, 1611.01)
centos/7 (virtualbox, 1611.01)
centos/atomic-host (virtualbox, 7.20170131)
coreos-stable (virtualbox, 1235.9.0)
debian/jessie64 (virtualbox, 8.7.0)
Note that the version of the vEOS box is embedded in the name. Now, you could not put the version in the name, but because there’s no metadata—which is why it shows (virtualbox, 0)
on that line—you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which version you had. Further, what happens when you want to have multiple versions of the vEOS box?
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix (inspired by the way CoreOS distributes their Vagrant box). Just create a file with the Continue reading
In the last part of the free Docker Networking Fundamentals webinar Dinesh Dutt described the newer high-performance networking options (Macvlan and Ipvlan) introduced in Docker version 1.12.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #78! Here’s another collection of links and articles from around the Internet discussing various data center-focused technologies.
Nothing this time around, sorry!
Introducing oVirt virtual machine management via Vagrant.
In this short tutorial I'm going to give a brief introduction on how to use vagrant to manage oVirt with the new community developed oVirt v4 Vagrant provider.
Vagrant is a way to tool to create portable and reproducible environments. We can use it to provision and manage virtual machines in oVirt by managing a base box (small enough to fit in github as an artifact) and a Vagrantfile. The Vagrantfile is the piece of configuration that defines everything about the virtual machines: memory, cpu, base image, and any other configuration that is specific to the hosting environment.
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-ovirt4
To start off, I'm going to use this Vagrantfile:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'ovirt4'
config.vm.hostname = "test-vm"
config.vm.box_url = 'https://github.com/myoung34/vagrant-ovirt4/blob/master/example_box/dummy.box?raw=true'
config.vm.network :private_network,
:ip => '192.168.56.100', :nictype => 'virtio', :netmask Continue reading
Hi Folks, I know it’s been a few weeks but I assure you I’ve been heads down on good stuff. You’ll get to see much of it on the blog, but also at Red Hat Summit 2017 in Boston, MA if you’re so inclined.
So what will I (and my colleagues) be talking about at “Summit” this year?Well, there are several RHV & KVM specific activities at Summit that I’ll have something to do with, 2 directly and multiple indirectly:
Breakout Session – High Availability for Red Hat Virtualization Manager
This will be my primary presentation on RHV, where I talk about and provide demo’s on RHV Hosted Engine, mostly in the context of HA (why and how), but also in the context of how it’s used in a new Red Hat product… (cue dramatic music..)
Breakout Session – Red Hat Virtualization and KVM Roadmaps
This is my colleagues’ session, and typically standing room only. I may help organize, but the Product Managers (Moran & Yaniv) will knock this out. It lays out the future of both Red Hat Virtualization and the core technology, KVM.
Lightning Talk – Reporting and Metrics Update
Again, my colleague’s session (Yaniv), but Continue reading
As part of my migration to Linux as my primary laptop OS, I needed to revisit my choice of virtualization provider. Long-time readers probably know that I was an early adopter of VMware Fusion, starting way back in 2006 with the very first “friends and family” release (before it was even publicly available). Obviously I can’t use Fusion on Linux, but do I use VMware Workstation for Linux? VirtualBox? Or something else? That’s what I set out to determine, and in this post I’ll share what I selected and the reasoning behind my selection.
So what were the options to consider? While there may be some other solutions, these are the three I primarily assessed:
Since I have been using Vagrant quite a bit over the last few years, whatever solution I selected needed to work reasonably well with Vagrant.
I’m pretty familiar with KVM and Libvirt, so I started there. Given that KVM and Libvirt are “native” to Linux, it felt like it would be a clean solution. While Continue reading
Last fall, I wrote a piece about why I had switched to VirtualBox (from VMware Fusion) for my Vagrant needs. As part of my switch to Fedora Linux as my primary laptop OS, I revisited my choice of virtualization provider. I’ll describe that re-assessment in a separate post; the “TL;DR” for this post is that I settled on VirtualBox. As it turns out, though, installing VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 25 isn’t as straightforward as one might expect.
After a number of attempts (using a test VM to iron out the “best” procedure), here’s the process I found to be the most straightforward:
Run dnf check-update
and dnf upgrade
to pick up the latest packages. If a new kernel version is installed, reboot. (I know this sounds contrived, but I’ve run into issues where some kernel-related packages aren’t available for the kernel version you’re actually running.)
Install the RPMFusion repos. You only really need the “free” repository, but you can install the “nonfree” as well if you like (it won’t affect this process). I won’t go through the process for how to do this; it’s really well-documented on the RPMFusion web site and is pretty straightforward.
Next, use Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #77. I’ve got a new collection of links and articles from around the Web on various data center-focused technologies.
In Episode 69 of Software Gone Wild we discussed ways of increasing visibility into VXLAN transport fabric. Another thing we badly need is visibility into the virtual edge behavior, and to help you get there Iwan Rahabok created a set of vRealize dashboards that include the virtual edge networking components. Hope you’ll find them useful.