Automated disk partitioning on virtual machines with Cobbler

The default Cobbler Snippets just do simple auto partitioning. For a more sophisticated partition layout you need to know what kind of VM you are going to install. KVMs and RHEVs device name is /dev/vda, Xen uses /dev/xvda and ESX /dev/sda. Luckily this can be figured out automatically, those different virtualization vendors are using its own MAC prefixes. So we can add two nice small Cobbler snippets to do the job. In this example, I call them hw-detect and partitioning. ….Read More

Kernel 3.5.3 partially broken for virtualization

Some time ago, Fedora 17 got a Kernel update to 3.5.3-1. Since then, PXE booting virtual machines does not work anymore. It seems that it has not been fixed in the upstream Kernel, but only the 3.5 series of Kernels is affected. A bug has been filed, but no fix is available. The only solution for now is to stick to Kernel 3.4.5-2. I’ve checked the Fedora annouce mailinglist, looks like there have been no grave bugfixes since then. The ….Read More

A review of RHEV

In the past few weeks I had the chance to have a closer look at the current release 2.2. The reason is that I’m working on a project using RHEL6 clients as virtual Desktops. For a proof-of-concept I’ve set up a test environment in the lab. Due to the lack of time I was not able to test every single feature. After reading some docs, it was amazingly easily and quickly installed. Test environment The tests have been made on ….Read More

Spice and RHEV, a RHCE goes MCSE

I’m currently working in a project which includes some virtual Linux desktops. The desktop of choice is RHEL6. How to bring a Linux desktop via WAN to a thin client? VNC -> are you nuts? Remote X11 over SSH -> WAN = no go. NX -> another vendor involved. SPICE -> Spicy! But: Spice over WAN? To be tested… SPICE is the protocol used by RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization). Some time ago I had the chance to test this ….Read More

Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers. So, what are the news? 1. The bugs in the ….Read More

Red Hat’s virtualization strategy has redundancy – Quo vadis?

A couple of days there have been some reports that Red Hat will release a commercialized version of deltacloud, an abstraction layer for different kinds of virtualization technologies and clouds such as VMware, RHEV, Amazon EC2 etc. Red Hat puts a lot of resources on virtualization, they maintain and/or sponsor multiple projects in parallel. The most important from my point of view is libvirt which is as well an abstraction layer for different virtulization technologies such as VMware, KVM, Xen ….Read More

KVM supports live migration between CPUs with different features

The video is a bit old, it is from November 2008. But it is still quite interesting to see and discuss about it. With KVM you can upgrade your farm of servers easy, it does not matter if the new servers have CPUs with new features or not. I’m not sure if you can do this with ESX, I guess not, you probably need to migrate them shut down. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ Have fun!

Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3

Still no official informations Red Hat is still refusing any questions about the features of RHEL 6 and its Linux Kernel. However: Since Vanilla Kernel 2.6.33 vmxnet3 and pvscsi is supported. Fedora 13 Alpha 3 is shipped with a derivate of Kernel 2.6.33. I still hope that Red Hat is switching to 2.6.33 or back-porting the VMWare code to its 2.6.32 derivative Kernel as known by RHEL 6 Alpha 3. Experiences with F13a3 so far Installing F13a3 on a ESX ….Read More