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Category Archives for "Virtualization"

The Need for Speed—Coming Changes in oVirt’s CI Standards

oVirt's CI standards have been in use for a while in most oVirt projects and have largely been a success.

These standards have put the control of what the CI system does in the hands of the developers without them having to learn about Jenkins and the tooling around it. The way the standards were implemented, with the mock_runner.sh script, also enabled developers to easily emulate the CI system on their own machines to debug and diagnose issues.

From the oVirt infra team's point of view, the CI standards have removed the need to constantly maintain build dependencies on the Jenkins slaves and also eliminated most of the situations where jobs running on the same slave influenced one another.

The CI standards implementation we have has one shortcoming, it is not particularity fast.

We started seriously looking at this after one of the VDSM maintainers reported that the check_patch jobs for his project are running for far too long a time. In the end it turned out that a major reason for the delay was in the way the tests themselves worked, but still, we looked at mock_runner.sh and managed to speed it up quite a Continue reading

Get all the Docker talks from Tech Field Day 12

Tech Field DayAs 2016 comes to a close, we are excited to have participated in a few of the Tech Field Day and inaugural Cloud Field Day events to share the Docker technology with the IT leaders and evangelists that Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth have cultivated into this fantastic group.  The final event was Tech Field Day 12 hosting in Silicon Valley.

In case you missed the live stream, check out videos of the sessions here.

Session 1: Introduction to Docker and Docker Datacenter

Session 2: Securing the Software Supply Chain with Docker

Session 3: Docker for Windows Server and Windows Containers

Session 4: Docker for AWS and Azure

Session 5: Docker Networking Fabric

These are great overviews of the Docker technology applied to enterprise app pipelines, operations, and  diverse operating systems and cloud environments. And most importantly, this was a great opportunity to meet some new people and get them excited about what we are excited about.

 

Visit the Tech Field Day site to watch more videos from previous events, read articles written by delegates or view the conversation online.

New #Docker videos from #TFD12 @TechFieldDay w/ @SFoskett @GestaltIT Continue reading

Еxtension of iptables Rules on oVirt 4.0 Hosts

In one of my last articles I described the example of installing HP System Management Tools to the physical server HP ProLiant DL360 G5 with CentOS Linux 7.2. After a while, the same exact server was used as a virtualization host and the oVirt Hosted Engine components were deployed on it. The host was put into maintenance mode recently, all packages were upgraded from the online repository, including the HP tool pack installed on it.

After the installation, I decided to check the workability of the upgraded tools. I also tried to open the web page of HP System Management homepage, but I didn’t succeed, because the host was simply blocking TCP port 2381.

Firewalld service was stopped on the host and the iptables was loaded with a set of rules, which was typical for oVirt. Moreover, the rules on all oVirt hosts, which I was deploying with the oVirt Engine web console, were the same.

In order to edit the rules, which are shared and centralized to all hosts from the oVirt Engine, we need to use the engine-config tool within the Engine server.

The engine-config tool has a large set of keys, which set the oVirt infrastructure Continue reading

New oVirt Project Underway

As oVirt continues to grow, the many projects within the broader oVirt community are thriving as well. Today, the oVirt community is pleased to announce the addition of a new incubator subproject, Vagrant Provider, as well as the graduation of another subproject, moVirt, from incubator to full project status!

According to maintainer Marc Young, Vagrant Provider is a provider plugin for the Vagrant suite that enables command-line ease of virtual machine provisioning and lifecycle management.

More on Vagrant Provider

The Vagrant provider plugin will interface with the oVirt REST API (version 4 and higher) using the oVirt provided ruby SDK 'ovirt-engine-sdk-ruby'. This allows users to abstract the user interface and experience into a set of command-line abilities to create, provision, destroy and manage the complete lifecycle of virtual machines. It also allows the use of external configuration management and configuration files themselves to be committed into code.

As Young explains in his project proposal, the "trend in configuration management, operations, and devops has been to maintain as much of the development process as possible in terms of the virtual machines and hosts that they run on. With software like Terraform the tasks of creating the underlying infrastructure such as Continue reading

How to Setup HA for RHV-M pt2

Hi folks, I’m finally getting around to the high availability for RHV-M (hosted engine) walk through demo that I promised. The truth is that due to unforeseen circumstances, I had to go to “plan b”. The end result is still the same, and the workflows are almost identical, but the “in betweens” are just a bit different.

Allow me to illuminate..

So when I last left off, I was explaining the virtues of both the lightweight virtualization host (RHVH) as well as the hosted engine configuration for use as a means of providing high availability for RHV-M, the management piece for RHV. Hosted engine can support either (not both at the same time) RHVH or RHEL hosts as the hypervisor nodes.. While I really wanted to show you how get things up and running with RHVH first, I’m going to show you the “RHEL way” first. I’ll come back around the RHVH, I promise.

The workflow for getting things up and ready is very similar when comparing RHVH and RHEL – hosts, networks, and storage all get setup. DNS (forward and reverse, FQDN for hosts and RHV-M) is configured. Subscriptions are set and hosts are updated. The biggest differences are Continue reading

oVirt Newsletter—November 2016

oVirt's development is continuing on pace, as the calendar year draws to a close and we get ready for a new year of development, evangelism, and making virtual machine management a simple process for everyone.

Here's what happened in November of 2016.

Software Releases

oVirt 4.0.6 Third Release Candidate is now available

oVirt 4.1.0 First Beta Release is now available for testing

In the Community

Testing ovirt-engine changes without a real cluster

Request for oVirt Ansible modules testing feedback

Deep Dives and Technical Discussions

Important Open Source Cloud Products [German]

Red Hat IT runs OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat Virtualization and Ansible

Keynote: Blurring the Lines: The Continuum Between Containers and VMs [Video]

Quick Guide: How to Plan Your Red Hat Virtualization 4.0 Deployment

A Decade of KVM [Chinese]

Expansion of iptables Rules for oVirt 4.0 [Russian]

Your Agenda for HPE Discover London 2016

Docker at HPE Discover
 

Next week HPE will host more than 10,000 top IT executives, architects, engineers, partners and thought-leaders from across Europe at Discover 2016 London, November 29th – December 1st in London.

Come visit Docker in Booth #208 to learn how Docker’s Containers-as-a-Service platform is transforming modern application infrastructures, allowing business to benefit from a more agile development environment.

Docker experts will be on-hand to for in-booth demos, hands-on-labs, breakout sessions and Transformation Zone sessions to demonstrate how Docker’s infrastructure platform, provides businesses with a unifying framework to embrace hybrid infrastructures and optimize resource utilization across legacy and modern Linux and Windows applications.

Not attending Discover London? Don’t miss a thing and “Save the Date” for the live streaming of keynotes and top sessions beginning November 29th at 11:00 GMT and through the duration of the event.

Be sure to add these key Docker sessions to your HPE Discover London agenda:

Ongoing: Transformation Zone Hours Show Floor

DEMO315: HPE IT Docker success stories

Supercharge your container deployments on bare metal and VMs by orchestrating large workloads using simple Docker mechanisms. See how the HPE team automated Continue reading

Technology Short Take #73

Welcome to Technology Short Take #73. Sorry for the long delay since the last Technology Short Take; personal matters have been taking quite the toll (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know to what personal matters I’m referring). In any case, enough of that—here’s some data center-related content that I hope you find useful!

Networking

  • Ansible has made some good progress in supporting network automation in the latest release (2.2), according to this blog post. This is an area where I hope to spend more time in the coming weeks before years’ end.
  • Tomas Fojta shows how to use a PowerShell script to monitor the health of NSX Edge gateways.
  • Jeremy Stretch mulls over the (perceived) problem of getting traffic into and out of overlay networks. I recommend reading this article, as well as reading the comments. Many commenters suggest just using L3 and having the hosts participate in a routing protocol like BGP, but as Jeremy points out many switches don’t have the capacity to handle that many routes. (Or, if they do, they’re quite expensive.) Seems like there’s this company in Palo Alto making a product that handles this issue pretty decently…(hint).
  • Cumulus Continue reading

Can VMware NSX and Cisco ACI Interoperate over VXLAN?

I got a long list of VXLAN-related questions from one of my subscribers. It started with an easy one:

Does Cisco ACI use VXLAN inside the fabric or is something else used instead of VXLAN?

ACI uses VXLAN but not in a way that would be (AFAIK) interoperable with any non-Cisco product. While they do use some proprietary tagging bits, the real challenge is the control plane.

Read more ...

How to Setup HA for RHV-M 4 pt1

Hi folks! After plowing through my home lab, I’m ready to walk you through setting up RHV-M in a “self-hosted engine” (HA) configuration. I’ve talked about this in some previous articles if you need to familiarize yourself with what the significance is or why someone might want to go with this approach over a standard deployment.

Let’s get to it.

Pre-Setup

Sounds funny, right? “Pre-setup”.. like you’re going to setup before you setup? But really, that’s what you need to do. In this case, everything needs to be right before you just dive right into the deep end of the lake, or you’re going to hit rocks. What I mean is that your underlying environment needs to be right, or things will not go smoothly at all.

Specifically, you’re going to need to pay attention to the requirements of the hosts and RHV-M software.. the specs are well published. For example, you need to have fully qualified domain names for all of your hosts and RHV-M, and they need to resolve (forward and reverse!) in some form of DNS. Just using “/etc/hosts” isn’t going to cut it here.. Don’t have running DNS in your lab, don’t sweat it, look Continue reading

Testing ovirt-engine changes without a real cluster

The ovirt-engine component of oVirt is the brain of oVirt and is responsible for managing attached systems; providing the webadmin UI and REST interfaces; and other core tasks. The process of setting up a real cluster on which to deploy the project is a time-consuming task that greatly increases patch turnaround time and can provide a significant barrier of entry to those wanting to contribute to the project.

Development Environment

There are couple of preparation steps you must take to create your development environment. I am using CentOS 7 as my development machine so I will use that system to describe everything, but it should be pretty straightforward to adapt the article to Fedora.

We first need the source code for the ovirt-engine itself. You can get it from the project's code review tool: gerrit.ovirt.org. Just execute the following command and wait for it to finish:

# git clone git://gerrit.ovirt.org/ovirt-engine.git

You will also need a directory for the development deployments, so create a directory somewhere. Mine is in ~/Applications/ovirt-engine-prefix. I have set the$OVIRT_PREFIX environment variable to point to that path, so when you see it used throughout this article, substitute the path for your own Continue reading

An Introduction to the VirtualBox CLI

This post provides a basic introduction to the VirtualBox CLI (command-line interface) tool, vboxmanage. This post does not attempt to replace the comprehensive documentation; rather, its purpose is to help users who are new to vboxmanage (such as myself, having recently adopted VirtualBox for my Vagrant environments) get somewhat up to speed as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Basic Commands

Let’s start with some basic operations. Here are a few to get you started:

  • To list all the registered VMs, simply run vboxmanage list vms. Note that if you are using Vagrant with VirtualBox, this command will also show VirtualBox VMs that have been instantiated by Vagrant. Similarly, if you are using Docker Machine with VirtualBox, this command will show you VMs created by Docker Machine.

  • To list all the running VMs, use vboxmanage list runningvms.

  • To start a VM, run vboxmanage startvm <name or UUID>. You can optionally specify a --type parameter to control how the VM is started. Using --type gui will show it via the host GUI; using --type headless means you’ll need to interact over the network (typically via SSH). To emulate Vagrant/Docker Machine-like behavior, you’d use --type headless.

  • Once a VM is Continue reading

RHV and DNS

Hi folks, here’s another “pre” post. What I mean by that is that in the process of creating a demo and the surrounding article, I found I needed to create a sidebar article in order to show how configure an important component. In this case, the requirement to fulfill forward and reverse name server resolution in RHV has lead me to create a basic DNS server. In this case, “dnsmasq” is a perfect solution…

Let me be clear here: I am NOT recommending dnsmasq for production DNS. For production I would recommend deploying BIND, Red Hat IdM, or something else. I’m using dnsmasq because I need something for my home lab and I think you might benefit from the configuration I’m using in your home or test lab. I don’t have that many systems, and a lightweight service like dnsmasq will work nicely.

Background

The RHV 4 documentation is very clear about the requirement for FQDN and fully functional DNS. Simply relying on “/etc/hosts” isn’t going to cut it anymore. Dnsmasq will provide a great and simple solution for small labs. For the uninitiated, dnsmasq provides DHCP, TFTP, DNS, and DNS forwarding. We’ll really only be concerned with the DNS Continue reading

Running a standalone OpenStack Neutron server

One of the great advantage for an OpenStack developer is the ease with which a dev environment can be created. I cannot say enough good things about devstack. Devstack is a tool that provides a very flexible way of creating development environment for OpenStack. Devstack is very flexible and can be configured using simple config … Continue reading Running a standalone OpenStack Neutron server

oVirt Software Defined Networking, The OVN Network Provider

oVirt offers not only its own internal networking, but also an API for external network providers. This API enables using external network management software inside environments managed by oVirt and takes advantage of their extended capabilities. One of such solutions is OVN: Open Virtual Network. OVN is an OVS (Open vSwitch) extension that brings Software Defined Networking to OVS.

OVN enables support for virtual networks abstraction by adding native OVS support for virtual L2 and L3 overlays. This allows the user to create as many VM networks as required, without troubling the adminstrator with vlan requests or infrastructure changes.

The oVirt provider for OVN consists of two parts: * The oVirt OVN driver * The oVirt OVN provider

oVirt OVN Driver

The oVirt OVN driver is the Virtual Interface Driver placed on oVirt hosts that handle the wiring of VM NICs to OVN networking.

The driver allows Vdsm, libvirt, and OVN to interact whenever a NIC is plugged in such a way that the VM NIC is added to an appropriate OVN Logical Switch and the appropriate OVN overlays on all the hosts in the oVirt environment.

The oVirt OVN driver rpm is now available for testing. The latest version Continue reading

NFS & Firewalls in RHEL 7

Here is a quick post for you guys. I’m in the midst of creating a follow up to one of my other articles and it dawns on me that I need to do this particular post first.. A post within a post, or before a post, or something. In either case, I need to provide an update to configuring NFS to poke through a firewall in RHEL 7 for the purpose of RHV in a home lab.. or other use cases. Read on, if you will…

Background

In some older posts, I show you how to configure NFSv3 to use predictable ports in RHEL so that it is more IPtables friendly. You don’t want to shut your firewall down and leave your security wide open. And if your firewall is also doing other work for you like port forwarding, then your ~really~ can’t shut it down…

So here’s the skinny: I’m in the process of setting up new systems for “RHV w/ Hosted Engine”, and I’m using an NFS server for the storage. It’s a home lab, so I’m not exactly worried about performance. I really don’t recommend using a Linux server for production NFS in virtualization, but again, this Continue reading

Setting Community Values

The oVirt community is made up of a diverse mix of individuals using and contributing to all aspects of the project from all over the world, and we want to make sure that the community is a safe and friendly place for everyone.

This code of conduct applies equally to founders, mentors, and those seeking help and guidance. It applies to all spaces managed by the oVirt project, including IRC, mailing lists, GitHub, Gerrit, oVirt events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication.

While we have contribution guidelines for specific tools, we expect all members of our community to follow these general guidelines and be accountable to the community. This isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do. Rather, take it in the spirit in which it’s intended—a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us and the technical communities in which we participate.

To that end, some members of the oVirt community have put together a new Community Code of Conduct to help guide everyone through what it means to be respectful and tolerant in a global community like the oVirt Project.

We're not looking for a Continue reading

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