Red Hat’s virtualisation product, RHEV, was slightly hamstrung in v2 seeing as the manager technology ( which had previously been purchased from Qumranet ) only ran on Windows. This requirement is something that has put me off that product until now – RHEV 3 has been released with a JBoss-based management server now and a whole lot of feature goodness. But it’s a paid-for product and not everyone can afford this. So the Open Source oVirt project is the next best thing.
oVirt comes in 2 parts:
- ovirt-engine ( the manager )
- ovirt-node ( the compute node )
These are currently based off of Fedora 16 with an additional repo for the engine but with Fedora 17, it should be integrated. oVirt currently supports FC, iSCSI and NFS as storage repositories for VM images while NFS is supported for ISO and export images. A requirement is that all CPU technology in the oVirt cluster is the same.
oVirt installation is quite straightforward. The first step is to install ovirt-engine.
- install a machine with Fedora 16
- add the ovirt repository
- install the ovirt-engine packages
- configure ovirt-engine
- for the Spice-based console, install spice-xpi
Next, install one or more ovirt-node machines using the oVirt Project-supplied ISO. Once you’ve configured your nodes with basic networking, you can add them to your ovirt-engine through the management console.
Also configure:
- a storage domain for iSCSI/FC/NFS storage of your VM images
- an NFS storage domain for your ISO install images
Then you can get down to the business of creating virtual machines. Happy virtualising!