Storage deduplication technology has been on the market for quite some time now. Unfortunately all of the implementations have been vendor-specific proprietary software. With VDO, there is now an open-source Linux native solution available. Red hat has introduced VDO (Virtual Data Optimizer) in RHEL 7.5, a storage deduplication technology bough with Permabit in 2017. Of course it has been open-sourced since then. In contrast to ZFS which provides the same functionality on the file system level, VDO is an inline ….Read More
Tag: Virtualization
Using Ansible to automate oVirt and RHV environments
Bored of clicking in the WebUI of RHV or oVirt? Automate it with Ansible! Set up a complete virtualization environment within a few minutes. Some time ago, Ansible includes a module for orchestrating RHV environments. It allows you to automate the setup of such an environment as well as automating daily tasks. Preparation Of course, Ansible can not automate all tasks, you need to set up a few things manually. Lets assume you want your oVirt-engine or RHV-manager running outside ….Read More
PXE boot a virtual machine with NAT connection to the host
If you have a notebook and you want to quickly deploy new virtual machines for testing, PXE boot is your friend. On notebooks people are usally not using a bridged network but NAT instead. The DHCP server on the host that is managed by Libvirt needs to configured with the TFTP server and the boot file. On my “mobile lab”, I’ve installed a virtual machine with a Redhat Satellite 5 where the other VMs get its content from. PXE boot ….Read More
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
RHEV 3.1 – an overview about the new features
Recently Red Hat announced the public availability of RHEV 3.1. Finally, no more Windows needed for the whole software stack 🙂 In 3.0, the new webadmin interface was already inncluded, as a tech preview and had its problems. Now with 3.1 its working great and looks neat. In contrary to 3.0, it is now listening on the standard ports 80 and 443. This will probably help users in organizations with strict proxy policies and setting. So what else is new? ….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