Video: What Is PowerNSX?

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

Want to Learn More about Docker and Containers?

One of my readers wanted to know more about containers and wondered how ipSpace.net materials could help him. Here’s a short step-by-step guide:

I published this blog post to help ipSpace.net subscribers navigate through Docker- and containers-related material. You might want to skip it if you’re not one of them.

Up and Running with oVirt 4.2 and Gluster Storage

In December, the oVirt Project shipped version 4.2 of its open source virtualization management system. With a new release comes an update to this howto for running oVirt together with Gluster storage using a trio of servers to provide for the system's virtualization and storage needs, in a configuration that allows you to take one of the three hosts down at a time without disrupting your running VMs.

If you're looking instead for a simpler, single-machine option for trying out oVirt, your best bet is the oVirt Live ISO page. This is a LiveCD image that you can burn onto a blank CD or copy onto a USB stick to boot from and run oVirt. This is probably the fastest way to get up and running, but once you're up, this is definitely a low-performance option, and not suitable for extended use or expansion.

Read on to learn about my favorite way of running oVirt.

oVirt, Glusterized

Prerequisites

Hardware: You’ll need three machines with 16GB or more of RAM and processors with hardware virtualization extensions. Physical machines are best, but you can test oVirt using nested KVM as well. I've written this howto using VMs running on my "real" Continue reading

Up and Running with oVirt 4.2 and Gluster Storage

In December, the oVirt Project shipped version 4.2 of its open source virtualization management system. With a new release comes an update to this howto for running oVirt together with Gluster storage using a trio of servers to provide for the system's virtualization and storage needs, in a configuration that allows you to take one of the three hosts down at a time without disrupting your running VMs.

If you're looking instead for a simpler, single-machine option for trying out oVirt, your best bet is the oVirt Live ISO page. This is a LiveCD image that you can burn onto a blank CD or copy onto a USB stick to boot from and run oVirt. This is probably the fastest way to get up and running, but once you're up, this is definitely a low-performance option, and not suitable for extended use or expansion.

Read on to learn about my favorite way of running oVirt.

oVirt, Glusterized

Prerequisites

Hardware: You’ll need three machines with 16GB or more of RAM and processors with hardware virtualization extensions. Physical machines are best, but you can test oVirt using nested KVM as well. I've written this howto using VMs running on my "real" Continue reading

OVN and Red Hat Virtualization: Provisioning OVN

Hi folks, in this final post on RHV and OVN I’m going to show you how to utilize everything we’ve learned and installed up to this point. We’ve installed the packages, now it’s just a matter of deploying some virtual machines and attaching them to the new OVN provided SDN. As before my colleague, Tony James walks us through the process. Let’s get started.

Like any other integration in Red Hat Virtualization, we access OVN by way of the External Provider feature. In short, the External Provider allows RHV to take advantage of resources managed by external sources, in this case SDN.

Let’s post the video first, the walk through follows:

Add an External Network Provider

The External Provider dialog is launched from the “tree” menu on the far left of the dashboard. We give the network a name and because the OVN controller was deployed on the RHV-M host, the external provider simply points at the local host and port 9696. The external provider type is “External Network Provider”, and the “Read Only” box is unchecked.

Add a Network

Under the “Network” tab, click “New” and enter a name for the new SDN. Check the “Create on external provider” Continue reading

Understanding the Container Network Interface (CNI)

Container Network Interface (CNI) is a framework and an interface that abstracts away the network stack from the container runtime. This abstraction helps separate container management and networking thereby providing different players in the market, target the two problems independently. CNI is one of the two frameworks that make this abstraction possible, the other being the Container Network Model (CNM) that Docker implements as libNetwork. When Docker developed libNetwork (based on CNM) for docker container networking, CoreOS came up with a competing model for rkt (pronounced rocket) their container runtime. CNI being the network interface of choice for Kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration platform, it has gained popularity. CNI is now part of the CNCF consortium.

The CNI"nterface" is composed of two components - NetPlugin and the IPAM plugin. While NetPlugin is responsible for setting up network plumbing i.e. conduit between the container & the host, the IPAM plugin is responsible for IP address allocation. Since these two are designed to be pluggable, we can pick-and-choose plugins from different sources/vendors for each of them. CNI takes in a JSON configuration file from the container runtime or from an orchestrator like Kubernetes, that specifies the choice for each Continue reading

oVirt 4.2.2 web admin UI browser bookmarks

oVirt web admin UI now allows the user to bookmark all entities and searches using their browser.

Synchronizing URL with application state

Whenever you select a detail view in the application, the browser URL is now updated to match the selected entity. For instance if you have a VM named MyVM and you click on the name to see the details, the URL of the browser will go to #vms-general;name=MyVM. If you switch to lets say the network interfaces tab the URL in your browser will switch to #vms-network_interfaces;name=MyVM. Changing entity or changing location will keep the browser URL synchronized. This allows you to use your browsers bookmark functionality to store a link to that VM.

Direct linking to entities

As a complementary functionality you can pass arguments to places that will execute some functionality based on the type of argument you have passed in. The following types are available:

• SEARCH, is for main views only, this allows you to pre populate the search string used in the search bar.
• NAME, most entities are uniquely named and you can use their name in a detail view to go directly to that named entity.
• DATACENTER, quota and networks are not uniquely Continue reading

oVirt 4.2.2 web admin UI browser bookmarks

oVirt web admin UI now allows the user to bookmark all entities and searches using their browser.

Synchronizing URL with application state

Whenever you select a detail view in the application, the browser URL is now updated to match the selected entity. For instance if you have a VM named MyVM and you click on the name to see the details, the URL of the browser will go to #vms-general;name=MyVM. If you switch to lets say the network interfaces tab the URL in your browser will switch to #vms-network_interfaces;name=MyVM. Changing entity or changing location will keep the browser URL synchronized. This allows you to use your browsers bookmark functionality to store a link to that VM.

Direct linking to entities

As a complementary functionality you can pass arguments to places that will execute some functionality based on the type of argument you have passed in. The following types are available:

• SEARCH, is for main views only, this allows you to pre populate the search string used in the search bar.
• NAME, most entities are uniquely named and you can use their name in a detail view to go directly to that named entity.
• DATACENTER, quota and networks are not uniquely Continue reading

Build oVirt Reports Using Grafana

Grafana, The open platform for beautiful analytics and monitoring, recently added support for PostgreSQL.

It in now possible to connect Grafana to oVirt DWH, in order to visualize and monitor the oVirt environment.

Grafana dashboard example

If you wish to create dashboards to monitor oVirt environment, you will need to install Grafana.

Grafana automatically creates an admin user and password.

You will need to add a PostgreSQL data source that connects to the DWH database.

For example:

You may want to add a read only user to connect the history database - Allowing read only access to the history database

Now you can start creating your dashboard widgets.

Go to Dashboards -> + New.

Graph panel example:

To add a Graph type panel, on the left side you have the Row controls menu. Go to the + Add Panel, and pick Graph.

Query example for the - Five Most Utilized Hosts by Memory / CPU:

SELECT DISTINCT
    min(time) AS time,
    MEM_Usage,
    host_name || 'MEM_Usage' as metric
FROM (
    SELECT
        stats_hosts.host_id,
        CASE
            WHEN delete_date IS NULL
                THEN host_name
            ELSE
                host_name
                ||
                ' (Removed on '
                ||
                CAST ( CAST ( delete_date AS date ) AS varchar )
                 Continue reading

VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX: Communicating with Native AWS Resources

If you haven’t already, please read my prior two blogs on VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware SDDC with NSX Expands to AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX – Connecting SDDCs Across Different AWS Regions; also posted on my personal blog at humairahmed.com. The prior blogs provide a good intro and information of some of the functionality and advantages of the service. In this blog post I expand the discussion to the advantages of VMware Cloud on AWS being able to communicate with native AWS resources. This is something that would be desired if you have native AWS EC2 instances you want VMware Cloud on AWS workloads to communicate with or if you want to leverage other native AWS services like AWS S3 VPC Endpoint or RDS. Continue reading

OVN and Red Hat Virtualization: Installing OVN

Hi folks, in the last article I provided an overview and introduction to OVN. This time around, I’ll provide a walkthrough on how to actually install it in your RHV environment. My colleague Tony created an Ansible playbook to automate the installation, and I’ll share the link to that at the end. Let’s get started.

Necessary Channels and Subscriptions

One of the first thing that Tony covers in the demo is that he used the standard channels for both RHV-M (engine) and Hosts (hypervisors) – nothing special is needed from a subscription standpoint as all of the packages are now included in RHV 4.1. Using the `ovs-vsctl show` command, we see that even though the openvswitch package is pulled in as part of the host install, nothing is configured by default.

Automate the Installation with Ansible

Next, we see Tony’s Ansible playbook. It covers 2 plays, one for the engine (RHV-M) and one for the hosts. Not only does it install the packages, but it configures firewalld. Specifically, the playbook does the following:

On the Engine:

It installs “ovirt-provider-ovn” package then it starts/restarts multiple services, north and southbound connections are set.

On the Hosts:

It installs the “ovirt-provider-ovn-driver” package. Continue reading

VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX: Connecting SDDCs Across Different AWS Regions

I prior shared this post on the LinkedIN publishing platform and my personal blog at HumairAhmed.com. In my prior blog post, I discussed how with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) customers get the best of both worlds for their move to a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) – the leading compute, storage, and network virtualization stack for enterprises deployed on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal, and highly available AWS infrastructure. Another benefit of VMC on AWS, and the focus of this post, is that you can easily have a global footprint by deploying multiple VMC SDDCs in different regions. Continue reading

oVirt 4.2 Is Now Generally Available

We are delighted to announce the general availability of oVirt 4.2, as of December 19, 2017, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

oVirt 4.2 is an altogether more powerful and flexible open source virtualization solution. The release is a major milestone for the project, encompassing over 1000 individual changes and a wide range of enhancements spanning storage, network, engine, user interface, and analytics.

What’s new in oVirt 4.2?

The big new features:

The Administration Portal has been redesigned using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes consistency and usability across IT applications. The result is a more intuitive and user-friendly user interface, featuring improved performance. Here is a screenshot of the Administration Portal dashboard:

A new VM Portal for non-admin users. Built with performance and ease of use in mind, the new VM portal delivers a more streamlined experience.

A High Performance VM type has been added to the existing "Server" and "Desktop" types. The new type enables administrators to easily optimize a VM for high performance workloads.

The oVirt Metrics Store is a real-time monitoring solution, providing complete infrastructure visibility for decision making Continue reading

oVirt 4.2 Is Now Generally Available

We are delighted to announce the general availability of oVirt 4.2, as of December 19, 2017, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

oVirt 4.2 is an altogether more powerful and flexible open source virtualization solution. The release is a major milestone for the project, encompassing over 1000 individual changes and a wide range of enhancements spanning storage, network, engine, user interface, and analytics.

What’s new in oVirt 4.2?

The big new features:

The Administration Portal has been redesigned using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes consistency and usability across IT applications. The result is a more intuitive and user-friendly user interface, featuring improved performance. Here is a screenshot of the Administration Portal dashboard:

A new VM Portal for non-admin users. Built with performance and ease of use in mind, the new VM portal delivers a more streamlined experience.

A High Performance VM type has been added to the existing "Server" and "Desktop" types. The new type enables administrators to easily optimize a VM for high performance workloads.

The oVirt Metrics Store is a real-time monitoring solution, providing complete infrastructure visibility for decision making Continue reading

Monitor Your oVirt Environment with oVirt Metrics Store

The oVirt project now includes a unified metrics and logs real-time monitoring solution for the oVirt environment.

Using Elasticsearch - a search and analytics engine - and its native visualization layer, Kibana, we now provide oVirt project users with a fully functional monitoring solution.

The solution includes self-service dashboards for creating your own dashboard, reports, and log analysis for both the engine and VDSM logs.

The Kibana dashboard

Combining Elasticsearch and kibana - both built on top of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) - with the collectd and fluentd client-side daemons, results in a powerful end-to-end solution.

For additional details, including how to set up the oVirt Metrics Store, please see the oVirt Metrics Store Feature page.

Monitor Your oVirt Environment with oVirt Metrics Store

The oVirt project now includes a unified metrics and logs real-time monitoring solution for the oVirt environment.

Using Elasticsearch - a search and analytics engine - and its native visualization layer, Kibana, we now provide oVirt project users with a fully functional monitoring solution.

The solution includes self-service dashboards for creating your own dashboard, reports, and log analysis for both the engine and VDSM logs.

The Kibana dashboard

Combining Elasticsearch and kibana - both built on top of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) - with the collectd and fluentd client-side daemons, results in a powerful end-to-end solution.

For additional details, including how to set up the oVirt Metrics Store, please see the oVirt Metrics Store Feature page.

VMware SDDC with NSX Expands to AWS

I prior shared this post on the LinkedIN publishing platform and my personal blog at HumairAhmed.com. There has been a lot of interest in the VMware Cloud on AWS  (VMC on AWS) service since its announcement and general availability. Writing this brief introductory post, the response  received confirmed the interest and value consumers see in this new service, and I hope to share more details in several follow-up posts.

VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies like vSphere ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX have been leveraged by thousands of customers globally to build reliable, flexible, agile, and highly available data center environments running thousands of workloads. I’ve also discussed prior how partners leverage VMware vSphere products and NSX to offer cloud environments/services to customers. In the VMworld Session NET1188BU: Disaster Recovery Solutions with NSX, I discussed how VMware Cloud Providers like iLand and IBM use NSX to provide cloud services like DRaaS. In 2016, VMware and AWS announced a strategic partnership, and, at VMworld this year, general availability of VMC on AWS was announced; this new service, and, how NSX is an integral component to this service, is the focus of this post.

Continue reading

Enable nested virtualization on Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform introduced nested virtualization support in September 2017. Nested virtualization is especially interesting to network emulation research since it allow users to run unmodified versions of popular network emulation tools like GNS3, EVE-NG, and Cloonix on a cloud instance.

Google Cloud supports nested virtualization using the KVM hypervisor on Linux instances. It does not support other hypervisors like VMware ESX or Xen, and it does not support nested virtualization for Windows instances.

In this post, I show how I set up nested virtualization in Google Cloud and I test the performance of nested virtual machines running on a Google Cloud VM instance.

Create Google Cloud account

Sign up for a free trial on Google Cloud. Google offers a generous three hundred dollar credit that is valid for a period of one year. So you pay nothing until either you have consumed $300 worth of services or one year has passed. I have been hacking on Google cloud for one month, using relatively large VMs, and I have consumed only 25% of my credits.

If you already use Google services like G-mail, then you already have a Google account and adding Google Cloud to your account is easy. Continue reading

Customizing the host deploy process

In 4.2 release we have introduced a possibility to customize the host-deploy process by running the Ansible post-tasks after the host-deploy process successfully finishes.

The reason

Prior to oVirt 4.2 release administrators could customize host's firewall rules using engine-config option IPTablesConfigSiteCustom. Unfortunately writing custom iptables rules into string value to be used in engine-config was very user unfriendly and using engine-config to provide custom firewalld rules would be even much worse. Because of above we have introduced Ansible integration as a part of host deploy flow, which allows administrators to add any custom actions executed on the host during host deploy flow.

Special tasks file

As part of this role we also include additional tasks, which could be written by the user, to modify the host-deploy process for example to open some more FirewallD ports.

Those additional tasks can be added to following file:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml

This post-task file is executed as part of host-deploy process just before setup network invocation.

Example

An example post-tasks file is provided by ovirt-engine installation, at following location:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml.example

This is just an example file, to add some task into host deploy flow, you need to create below mentioned file Continue reading

oVirt roles Ansible Galaxy integration

In 4.2 release we have splitted our oVirt Ansible roles into separate RPM packages and also separate git repositories, so it is possible for user to install specific role either from Ansible Galaxy or as RPM package.

The reason

The reason to split the roles into separate packages and git repositories was mainly the usage from the AWX/Ansible Tower. Since Ansible Galaxy is only integrated with github you need to store your Ansible role in single git repostiory in order to have separate Ansible role in Galaxy. Previously we used one single repository where we have stored all the roles, but because of that manual configuration was required to make those roles usable in AWX/Ansible Tower. So as you can see on image below we now have many roles in Ansible Galaxy under oVirt user:

How to install the roles

There are still two ways how to install the roles: either using Ansible Galaxy or using RPM package available from oVirt repositories.

Ansible Galaxy

You are now able to install just a single role and not necessarily all of them at once like in previous versions For example to install just oVirt cluster upgrade role, you have to run Continue reading